Instructor Spotlight: Liam Chalfonte

Tell us about yourself and what inspired you to teach this course

I’m a lifelong reader and a rather classic English major. I knew I wanted to teach an Ex College when I transferred into Tufts, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to teach. Eventually, after taking the (first ever!) speculative fiction writing class at Tufts, I realized how much I loved the genre and how little sci-fi, fantasy, and just generally weird fiction I was seeing in my syllabi. I wanted to be able to explore the subject more myself and help fill the gap I was seeing for other students.

What exactly is speculative fiction?

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for a number of genres, including Sci-fi, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, and others. As we talked about in class, its basic premise is the “what if” — posing the question of ‘what if this was different about our world?’ This can range from things as simple as someone having a superpower to things as outlandish as wholly different universes.

What is your favorite piece you are teaching this semester?

I’m extremely excited to teach Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, a 2019 novella written as a series of letters back and forth between two time travelling agents. I love the way the story uses its outlandish concept to make the love felt between the two characters feel even more real.

What role does speculative fiction play in imagining our future?

A pretty big one! Speculative fiction finds a lot of basis in the different ideas that guide our world: science, technology, society, culture. Sometimes it reflects our current ideas, but oftentimes it imagines new ones. Ideas like research universities, 3-D printing, AI, were all written about in speculative fiction before they existed as we know them today.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course?

I want students to come away from this course feeling comfortable and confident navigating college courses; reading different texts, writing responses and papers, analyzing and discussing a variety of topics. I hope they also come away from this class, whether or not speculative fiction ends up being their cup of tea, having found a piece of media that really connected with them.

What is something coming up in your course that you are excited about?

I have a handful of activities I’m excited for coming up! I really enjoy seeing my students work together and surprise me with the things they come up with. I have an in-class creative writing assignment that I’ll be giving in a few weeks, and based on my previous experiences with my students’ imaginations, it’s going to be an extremely fun class.

Liam Chalfonte (he/him) is a senior studying English and Political Science with a minor in Music. Hailing from Pittsfield, MA, he's been a Managing Editor for the Tufts Daily, a caretaker at the TMC Loj, and an inadvisable addition to Club Gymnastics. If he had free time, he'd probably spend it climbing trees and staring off into the distance.