Nastacia Schmoll holds a BA in English and a BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara as well as an MA in Literary Studies from the University of Zurich and is currently a doctoral student and a teaching and research assistant for Professor Barbara Straumann at the University of Zurich English Department.

She is interested in the potential of speculative fiction to challenge and provide possible alternatives to heteropatriarchal and euro- and anthropocentric structures and worldviews. As part of this, her research interrogates preconceived notions of genre, authorship, and readership. Her current PhD research examines depictions of spaces in science fiction texts, focusing primarily on the changing approaches to these speculative spaces in recent SF that provide new paradigms for thinking about the complex environmental and social challenges of the moment.

She is additionally interested in feminist and economic criticism, and her MA thesis explored depictions of female beauty as a precarious form or capital in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls. 

Students searching for a supervisor for a B.A. thesis on a topic related to Nastacia's seminars or other research interests are encouraged to contact her directly via email at nastacia.schmoll@es.uzh.ch

• Speculative Fiction
• Ecofiction
• Gender and Sexuality
• Race and Ethnicity
• Space/Spatiality