Stefan Rabitsch

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2024). One Nation Under Many Cowboy Hats: Western Hats and American Studies—A Cultural-Historical Conspectus. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 4(1), s. 197–213. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v4i1.105. Vis sammendrag

  Official year of journal issue is 2022 (Vol 4, Issue 1); but due to Covid-induced delays, the issue was finally only published on February 19, 2024

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “When you look at a calf, what do you see?”: Land(ed) Business, Necrotic Entrepreneurialism, and Competing Capitalisms in the Contemporary West of Yellowstone. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 3(2), s. 235–259. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v3i2.147. Vis sammendrag

  Official year of journal issue is 2022 (Vol 3, Issue 2); but due to Covid-induced delays, the issue was finally only published on June 21, 2023

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2022). “Out there hunting monsters”: Manifest Destiny and the Monstrosity of the American West. I Alexander, Dorian; Goodrum, Michael & Smith, Philip (Red.), Drawing the Past, Volume 1: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the United States. University Press of Mississippi. ISSN 9781496837165. s. 228–252. Vis sammendrag

  Contributions by Lawrence Abrams, Dorian L. Alexander, Max Bledstein, Peter Cullen Bryan, Stephen Connor, Matthew J. Costello, Martin Flanagan, Michael Fuchs, Michael Goodrum, Bridget Keown, Kaleb Knoblach, Christina M. Knopf, Martin Lund, Jordan Newton, Stefan Rabitsch, Maryanne Rhett, and Philip Smith History has always been a matter of arranging evidence into a narrative, but the public debate over the meanings we attach to a given history can seem particularly acute in our current age. Like all artistic mediums, comics possess the power to mold history into shapes that serve its prospective audience and creator both. It makes sense, then, that history, no stranger to the creation of hagiographies, particularly in the service of nationalism and other political ideologies, is so easily summoned to the panelled page. Comics, like statues, museums, and other vehicles for historical narrative, make both monsters and heroes of men while fueling combative beliefs in personal versions of United States history. Drawing the Past, Volume 1: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the United States, the first book in a two-volume series, provides a map of current approaches to comics and their engagement with historical representation. The first section of the book on history and form explores the existence, shape, and influence of comics as a medium. The second section concerns the question of trauma, understood both as individual traumas that can shape the relationship between the narrator and object, and historical traumas that invite a reassessment of existing social, economic, and cultural assumptions. The final section on mythic histories delves into ways in which comics add to the mythology of the US. Together, both volumes bring together a range of different approaches to diverse material and feature remarkable scholars from all over the world.

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Pyrka, Pawel (2022). “This is America. We Don't Share Land here.” Kevin Costner, Taylor Sheridan, and Remediating New/Post-West(ern) Scholarship in Yellowstone. I Sourdot, Ludovic & Janak, Edward (Red.), Kevin Costner, America's Teacher. Lexington Books. ISSN 978-1793647863. s. 95–127. Vis sammendrag

  Kevin Costner: America's Teacher examines the role of Costner in educational settings domestically and abroad. Costner’s career over the past 35 years has seen ups and downs: his movies grossed 2 billion dollars in ticket sales worldwide and he has he won/been nominated for several Academy Awards but he also experienced critical and box office failures. Through the films in his oeuvre, Costner has been teaching audiences around the world about the United States--its history, people and culture. Some viewers and scholars recognize this as positive, others as problematic. This book serves as a place for teachers and scholars to explore ways in which Costner may be tapped for research and teaching purposes at all levels of education. It is organized around three large themes: Costner’s baseball films and their connection to Americana; Costner’s films through the more critical lenses of gender and new western scholarship; and Costner’s teaching of teachers, the pedagogical possibilities of his work.

• Bishop, Katherine & Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). Star Trek Nemesis. I Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Red.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. s. 138–142. Vis sammendrag

  Star Trek Nemesis (2002), directed by Stuart Baird, is the final adventure for The Next Generation crew. This entry examines how the film launches inquiries into family, genetic determinism, and toxic masculinity: Captain Picard faces off his Romulan-spawned clone, Shinzon, leader of the Remans; Data faces his own mirror, his predecessor B-4. Authenticity, identity, and power also come under the film’s lens as the pairs struggle: Picard faces his own privilege and kills Shinzon; Data self-sacrifices to save his crew, but his consciousness appears to survive in B-4. Meanwhile, Counselor Troi becomes caught in Shinzon’s gaze; Picard orders her to allow his clone’s psychic violation. As this chapter discusses, she ultimately triumphs over one of her abusers. The power struggles within the film mirror those of its production and reception: NEM remains a controversial film, though most frequently critically discussed in conjunction with AI and cloning technology.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Red.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. s. 93–98. Vis sammendrag

  This chapter contends that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) occupies a somewhat singular position in that it serves as pars pro toto for Star Trek in its entirety. The creative team that brought the movie to fruition made accessible and translated to the silver screen Star Trek’s allegorical intentions—i.e., tackling human hubris derived from scientific prowess, age/aging, and death—set in a thinly veiled maritime world in outer space that was inspired by Napoleonic sea fiction. By doing so, they crafted a Star Trek movie which not only became a fan favorite, but also validated the serial potential of the franchise on the big screen.

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Salisbury, Tracey (2022). “Don't Leave out the Cowboys!” Black Urban Cowboydom and Didactic Afrofuturist Countermemories in Ghetto Cowboy (2011) and Concrete Cowboy (2021). Western American Literature. ISSN 0043-3462. 57(2), s. 111–126. doi: 10.1353/wal.2022.0013.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2020). Guilty Ahabs, Starbuckian Reason, and White Cetacean Contours in Outer Space: Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik. ISSN 0171-5410. 45(2), s. 217–238. doi: 10.2357/AAA-2019-001. Vis sammendrag

  The intermedial migration routes of Herman Melville’s magnum opus, MobyDick; or, The Whale 1851), are as vast and varied as those of his novel’s eponymous white leviathan. Since the sea, the wonders it holds, and the narrative voyages it has inspired have all served as correlatives for a realm that is vaster than the high seas and as yet largely inaccessible to us—outer space—it is unsurprising that cetaceans, along with the mysteriousness and awe they command, have left an inedible imprint on the imaginarium that fuels space-based science fiction (sf). Melville’s white whale has migrated into the “ocean of space” that is the vast outer space world of a popular cultural behemoth: Star Trek. This article produces a complete chart of all intermedial sightings of MobyDick in the Star Trek universe in an effort to document how writers and producers have extracted the same few elements to tell stories about guilt caused by personal trauma. Star Trek’s selective and systematic lifting of elements from the novel amount to an intermedial transpositioning of the character dynamic that governs Ahab’s interactions with Starbuck, the philosophical discussion over whether the whale’s actions are driven by malicious intent or undiscerning instinct, and Moby Dick’s signature whiteness.

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2019). The Birth of the Science Fiction Franchise. I Canavan, Gerry & Link, Eric Carl (Red.), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press. ISSN 9781107166097. s. 481–501. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1017/9781316694374.032. Vis sammendrag

  The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.

• Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Phillips, Michael (2019). The end is nigh! Bring forth the Shepard!: Mass Effect, the Apocalypse, and the Puritan Imagination. I Pöhlmann, Sascha (Red.), Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies. Walter de Gruyter (De Gruyter). ISSN 9783110655254. s. 35–48. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1515/9783110659405-003. Vis sammendrag

  American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2019). Playing America: An Introduction to American Culture through Video Games. Gamevironments. ISSN 2364-382X. 11, s. 86–102. Vis sammendrag

  This research report sketches one of our current projects - a textbook which approaches America (an imaginative construct more so than a geographic location) through video games. Thus, the intended outcome of this project is a ready-to-use primer to the key principles, myths, and beliefs that constitute America explained through the most relevant medium of the early twenty-first century - video games. Driven by the idea that the interactivity specific to video games facilitates student engagement, our textbook suggests a novel approach to engage with and understand both American Studies and American culture.

• Rabitsch, Stefan & Domenig, Christian (2018). “My People once lived in Caves”: Pre-modern Societies in Star Trek. I Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (Red.), Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISSN 978-3-319-73775-1. s. 71–81. Vis sammendrag

  Encounters with pre-modern societies are a popular topos in Star Trek. Starfleet’s intrepid explorers often make contact with worlds devoid of industry, electricity, and contemporary as well as futuristic comforts. Etymologically, the term pre-modern points to its root in ancient Greek – oikos (οϊκος) – which encompasses the family, the household, and property as well as the domicile itself – all headed by a chief called pater familias in Latin. Secondly, pre-modern refers a society whose everyday life is greatly influenced by (dogmatic) religion. And finally, the term connotes a society’s high dependency on agriculture. In the Star Trek universe, interactions with pre-warp civilizations are regulated by the Prime Directive, which actually prohibits any interference with such cultures. By reason of exigencies and for dramatic purposes, this Starfleet General Order 1 is often violated. Tapping into the didactic potential of example episodes and movies, this chapter discusses such violations vis-à-vis the images of pre-modern societies, which specifically refer to the Middle Ages. Ultimately, this chapter pursues a question central to the philosophy of history and the teaching thereof: Is the history of mankind paradigmatic for the whole universe?

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2018). “Wagon Wheels, Sails, and Warp Cores”: Star Trek and American Culture: Between Allegory and Worldbuilding. I Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (Red.), Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISSN 978-3-319-73775-1. s. 29–41. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73776-8. Vis sammendrag

  Science fiction (sf) stories, like other forms of popular culture, are interwoven with the historical moment(s) that produced them. Once we have acquired the reading/viewing protocols that allow us to adjust for the ‘estranging/estranged’ distortions of sf, we recognize more clearly the cultural imprints of the language, images, and values that such stories bear. As popular culture mirrors, they can provide creative access points for ascertaining and understanding the zeitgeist that brought them forth. Both the conception and the first run of Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–1969) provide reflections and refractions of American culture at a time when it witnessed major international transitions and domestic upheaval. Bearing a recognizable imprint of the post-war optimism and confidence in scientific progress, Star Trek’s premise of telling modern morality plays gives us access to that which Americans were hopeful and/or concerned about. Star Trek was also minted with the American self-image of being the protector and defender of the western world, its values and its achievements. By viewing John F. Kennedy’s presidency vis-à-vis Star Trek, we will see how the US, as a self-styled conqueror of a continent, began to integrate the ‘benevolent’ mission of its ideological predecessor, the British Empire, into its own national mythos.

• Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Erat, Vanessa (2018). Playing Serial Imperialists: The Failed Promises of BioWare’s Video Game Adventures. Journal of Popular Culture. ISSN 0022-3840. 51(6), s. 1476–1499. doi: 10.1111/jpcu.12736.
• Rabitsch, Stefan & Erat, Vanessa (2017). "Croeso i Gymru" – Where they speak Klingon and Sindarin: An Essay of Appreciation on ‘Conlangs’ and the Land of the Red Dragon. I Onysko, Alexander; Graf, Eva-Maria; Delanoy, Werner & Dobric, Nikola (Red.), The Polyphony of English Studies. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. ISSN 978-3-8233-8140-2. s. 197–219. Vis sammendrag

  This volume, in honor of Allan James, collects a range of articles from different domains of English studies as a token of Allan James’s academic interests and his integrative approach to the field. The contributions in linguistics encompass a spectrum of topics including world Englishes, professional discourse, language acquisition, collocation, translation, and multilingualism. Cultural aspects in language teaching and in literary analysis enrich the reading and hint at Allan James’ Welsh and Celtic roots while also going beyond that.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2016). “Hail Columbia! Vision of a Great City”: A taxonomic appraisal of American cities of the imagination in visual science fiction. I Grech, Victor; Scerri, Mariella & Zammit, David (Red.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Science Fiction: The interface of medicine, science and humanities in relation to the genre of science fiction. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. ISSN 978-1534982017. s. 156–188. Vis sammendrag

  Interdisciplinary perspectives in Science Fiction is the second book in what is to become a series of books created and published to explore the interface of medicine, science and humanities in relation to the genre of science fiction. The collection of papers are based on oral presentations delivered during a Science Fiction Symposium held in Malta in July, 2015 from various researchers working in different fields. A similar book on Star Trek: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Theory and Practice was published last year after the first academic symposium on Star Trek was held in Malta in July, 2014. The writers felt the need to document the interesting work delivered in both symposia, hence these works. Preparations for another Star Trek Symposium to celebrate the 50th anniversary from the launch of Star Trek in 1966 are also under way, creating a niche for a third publication. The enthusiasm, strong will and dedication of the writers, as well as the delegates’ motivation and encouragement make all this possible, giving them the impetus to actively engage themselves in further commitments of this type.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2016). "And yet, everything we do is usually based on the English": Sailing the mare incognitum of Star Trek’s transatlantic double consciousness with Horatio Hornblower. Science Fiction Film and Television. ISSN 1754-3770. 9(3), s. 439–472. doi: 10.3828/sfftv.2016.9.14. Vis sammendrag

  While pitched and sold to television executives as being a space western – which of course it was not – the world of Star Trek was intentionally and systematically modelled on the British golden age of sail as found in Napoleonic sea fiction. This article offers a synoptic and decidedly transatlantic critique of Star Trek, exposing a hidden British maritime world embedded beneath a veneer of ‘Americanness’. In doing so, it re-addresses and offers a corrective to the question of why Star-Trek-as-space-western has guided most Star Trek scholarship. It will show why it makes sense to re-historicise Star Trek not only as a product of the 1960s, but also as a distillate of impulses that originated in the late 1940s and 1950s. Remapping the origins of Star Trek along these lines reveals how and why it was only logical that the world-building of Star Trek was intentionally and continuously modelled on the eighteenth century British naval world. This maritime endowment is embedded in five maritime dimensions that shape the ontology of Star Trek’s future world in space. They encompass operational discourses, nomenclature, visual and conceptual aesthetics, and character archetypes as well as rituals, traditions and an entire maritime milieu.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). Space-age Hornblowers, or why Kirk and co. are not space cowboys: The Enlightenment mariners and transatlanticism of Star Trek. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Networ. ISSN 1755-9944. 5(2), s. 27–54. doi: 10.31165/nk.2012.52.268. Vis sammendrag

  Many mistakenly perceive Star Trek to be, simply, a “Wagon Train to the stars,” a space western/opera that projects the U.S. American frontier into outer space. However, by introducing his starship captain in archetypal terms as a ‘space-age Captain Horation [sic] Hornblower,’ and by making him a descendant of ‘similar [naval] men in the past,’ Star Trek (1966-1969) creator Gene Roddenberry makes it clear that his starship captain is not based on the quintessential cowboy hero found in the U.S. American national imagination (Roddenberry, 1964: 5). In this article, I seek to (re)map the character contours of the principle Star Trek captains and compare them with C. S. Forester’s ‘man alone,’ Horatio Hornblower, as well as with Hornblower’s romanticised predecessors. I will demonstrate how ‘Starfleet’s finest’ fit the role of the sentimental naval officer/hero of the Romantic period. Ultimately, it will become clear that Roddenberry used Horatio Hornblower as an archetypal blueprint to craft the Star Trek captains as interstellar masters and commanders, as well as spaceborne naturalists and scientists, extending the historio-mythical continuum of British maritime heroes into Star Trek’s fictional, yet “historical” future. The “Hornblowers in space” represent the central node in the decidedly transatlantic double consciousness of the Star Trek continuum - a maritime endowment which has largely escaped scholarly attention.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule(s) the space in Star Trek!: Maritime Histories, Transatlantic Anglophone Hegemonies and Science Fiction TV. I Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine & Herbe, Sarah (Red.), New Directions in the European Fantastic. Universitätsverlag Winter. ISSN 978-3-8253-6099-3. s. 139–152. Vis sammendrag

  Since the end of the Cold War a significant number of fantastic texts, films, artworks and new media practices across Europe have raised social and political questions. The fantastic typically works to disrupt the mimetic through supernatural, magical and visionary means. In this sense it breaks through boundaries of genre, space and identity. This volume explores a variety of contemporary fantastic literature and films, television, comics and cultural practices, ranging from new trends in European cinema over Polish fantasy novels to the role of the fantastic in contemporary European paganisms. The contributions show how the fantastic is used to comment on, and come to terms with, traumatic events; how it renegotiates the good-versus-evil opposition as well as the figure of the hero in texts produced after the end of the Cold War and in the wake of 9/11. A special focus is given to genre developments and to major themes such as the formation of national, cultural and personal identities or the blurring and redefinition of boundaries. ‘New Directions in the European Fantastic’ is an invaluable contribution both to the study of the traffic of the fantastic across genres, cultures and media and to critical debates about post-Cold-War and post-9/11 culture.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2011). "Wagon Train to the stars" - Star Trekkin’ the U.S. western frontier. I Rio, David; Ibarraran, Amaia & Simonson, Martin (Red.), Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts. Portal Education. ISSN 9788493836078. s. 177–204. Vis sammendrag

  Classical notions of the West and associated images, symbols, and values retain their appeal for an important number of Americans, as well as engaging the imagination of an international audience. However, despite the resilience of the myth, it may be argued that an increasing number of artistic portraits of the American West debunk traditional mythology, rejecting at the same time extreme reductionism to simplistic binary oppositions, such as the one between myth and reality. Instead, the main emphasis is on the West as a complex, interrelated, unfinished, and plural space, consisting of multiple meanings and often intercultural experiences.

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• Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Brandt, Stefan (2022). Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781496836632. 322 s. Vis sammendrag

  Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf’s videos, and Samuel Delany’s classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to “real-ize” that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

• Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISBN 9780367366674. 512 s. Vis sammendrag

  The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek offers a synoptic overview of Star Trek, its history, its influence, and the scholarly response to the franchise, as well as possibilities for further study. This volume aims to bridge the fields of science fiction and (trans)media studies, bringing together the many ways in which Star Trek franchising, fandom, storytelling, politics, history, and society have been represented. Seeking to propel further scholarly engagement, this Handbook offers new critical insights into the vast range of Star Trek texts, narrative strategies, audience responses, and theoretical themes and issues. This compilation includes both established and emerging scholars to foster a spirit of communal, trans-generational growth in the field and to present diversity to a traditional realm of science fiction studies.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2019). Star Trek and the British Age of Sail: The Maritime Influence Throughout the Series and Films. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-6463-7. 279 s. Vis sammendrag

  Clear all moorings, one-half impulse power and set course for a mare incognitum… A popular culture artifact of the New Frontier/Space Race era, Star Trek is often mistakenly viewed as a Space Western. However, the Western format is not what governs the worldbuilding of Star Trek, which was, after all, also pitched as “Hornblower in space.” Star Trek is modeled on the world of the “British Golden Age of Sail” as it is commonly found in the genre of sea fiction. This book re-historicizes and remaps the origins of the franchise and subsequently the entirety of its fictional world—the Star Trek continuum—on an as yet uncharted transatlantic bearing.

• Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (2018). Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-73775-1. 236 s. Vis sammendrag

  For 50 years, Star Trek has been an inspiration to its fans around the world, helping them to dream of a better future. This inspiration has entered our culture and helped to shape much of the technology of the early 21st Century. The contributors to this volume are researchers and teachers in a wide variety of disciplines; from Astrophysics to Ethnology, from English and History to Medicine and Video Games, and from American Studies to the study of Collective Computing Systems. What the authors have in common is that some version of Star Trek has inspired them, not only in their dreams of what may be, but in the ways in which they work - and teach others to work - here in the real world. Introduced with references to Star Trek films and television shows, and illustrated with original cartoons, each of the 15 chapters included in this volume provides insights into research and teaching in this range of academic fields.

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• Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Gene-Rowe, Francis (2023). Introduction to the Special Section: “Beyond Petromodernity”. Extrapolation. ISSN 0014-5483. 64(1), s. 1–9. doi: 10.3828/extr.2023.2.
• Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2023). The American Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Primer. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 3(2), s. 199–211. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v3i2.192. Vis sammendrag

  Official year of journal issue is 2022 (Vol 3, Issue 2); but due to Covid-induced delays, the issue was finally only published on June 21, 2023

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “‘I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom’: Star Trekkin’ White Cetacean Contours with Forlorn and Redemptive Ahabs.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “But all I know is, real cowboys is white”: Or, why Black Urban Cowboydom is speculative and Afrofuturist AF.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). From Morgan Kane to Sat-Okh: Finding and Teaching the West in Norwegian and Polish Backyards.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “I’m gonna let the world know we’re here”: Yellowstone as Postwest(ern) Classroom.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “Authenticity is the one thing that money [can] buy”: The Ironic Poetics and Politics of Verisimilitude in Yellowstone.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “I think I must be dreamin’, ’cause I just saw a horse run by”: The Disruptive Afrofuturist Pedagogy of Black Urban Cowboys.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “Outside this valley, who knows that we’re even here?”: Land(ed) Necrocapitalism and Post-Western (Dis)continuities in Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone.
• Rabitsch, Stefan & Gabriel, Martin (2022). Ein Kampf um Körper, Land und Seelen: Der ‘American Southwest’ von Francisco de Coronado (1540) bis zur ‘Pueblo-Revolte’ (1680). Pallsch: Zeitschrift für Militärgeschichte. 81, s. 49–65.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). “It’s the Mecca of dumb money. Not New York, not L.A., right here”: The West of Yellowstone as Wasteland of the Ultra Rich, Necrotic Capital, and Schumpeterian Creative Destruction.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). “It feels like I’m sitting on one of them giant walking machines in Star Wars”: Black Urban Cowboys, Hypnopompic (Re)cognition, Afrofuturist Sensibilities.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom”: Star Trekkin’ White Cetacean Contours with Forlorn and Redemptive Ahabs.
• Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (2022). Introduction: Open Hailing Frequencies. I Garcia-Siino, Leimar; Rabitsch, Stefan & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Red.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. s. 1–5.
• Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2022). Introduction. I Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Brandt, Stefan (Red.), Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. University Press of Mississippi. ISSN 9781496836632. s. 3–31. Vis sammendrag

  Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf’s videos, and Samuel Delany’s classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to “real-ize” that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

• Rabitsch, Stefan (2019). The Far Side of the Moon Race: Decoding the Transatlantic Heritage of JFK’s ‘Frontier’. KonaK: Realitätsausschnitte aus Kontinentalamerika und der Karibik. ISSN 1561-8056. 96, s. 8–15.
• Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). “Hornblower in space”: Britannia rules the transatlantic waves in Star Trek. Reflections: The Magazine of the C S Forester Society. ISSN 2042-1389. 22, s. 9–10.

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