New York Public Library: Utopia

The New York Public Library

Villemard
"Madame à sa Toilette" [Madame at Her Dressing Table]
Visions de l'an 2000, 1910
Chromolithograph
BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*

Commentators

Merritt Abrash
Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Professor Abrash co-founded the Society for Utopian Studies, directing two of its conferences, the Society's first in 1976, and another in 1985. From 1978 to 1981, he served as co-editor of Alternative Futures, a journal of utopian studies.

Benjamin R. Barber
Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University

Professor Barber is the author of fifteen books including the classic Strong Democracy (1984), the novel Marriage Voices (1981), and the recent international bestseller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), a critical study of the corrosive effects of tribalism and global markets on democracy. One project of The Walt Whitman Center is to establish a deliberative civic site on the Internet.

Francesco M. Battisti
Professor of Sociology, University of Cassino, Italy

Professor Battisti is the author of the following books: Il mondo sociale dei sogni [The Social World of Dreaming] (1998); Giubileo Panico 2000 [Jubilaeum Panic 2000], (2000); Giovani e utopia. Indagine sui sogni ad occhi aperti [Youth and Utopia. Inquiry upon Daydreaming], (forthcoming 2001). He is a member of the International Association for Utopian Studies, and manager of an Italian databank on dreams.

Robert S. Fogarty
Professor of History, Antioch College

Professor Fogarty is the editor of the Antioch Review. As a leading authority on American communes, he is the author of: Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller's Intimate Memoir (2000); All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements 1865-1914 (1999); Special Love/Special Sex: An Oneida Community Diary (1994); The Righteous Remnant: The House of David (1981); and the Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (1980).

James Gunn
Emeritus Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, University of Kansas

Professor Gunn is the author of nearly 100 published science fiction stories, twenty-six books, and the editor of ten, including the forthcoming The Millennium Blues (E-reads) and The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (Scarecrow).

Michael Heim
Philosopher and Professor, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California

Dr. Heim is the author of Electric Language (1987), The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993), and Virtual Realism (1998). He currently teaches courses in Virtual Worlds Theory and Virtual Worlds Design.

Naomi Jacobs
Professor of English, University of Maine

Professor Jacobs is the President of the Society for Utopian Studies. She is the author of The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Crosscurrents in Modern Fiction, Third Series (1990), "Failures of the Imagination in Ecotopia" (1997), "Beauty and the Body in News from Nowhere" (1997), "Islandia: Plotting Utopian Desire" (1995), "The Frozen Landscape in Women's Utopian and Science Fiction" [in Worlds of Difference: Utopian and Science Fiction by Women] (1994), "Beyond Stasis and Symmetry: Lessing, LeGuin, and the Remodeling of Utopia" (l988), "Person and Persona in Recombinant Science Fiction" (1987), and "Substance and Reality in Hawthorne's Meta-Utopia" [in Utopian Studies I] (l987).

Ruth Levitas
Reader in Sociology, University of Bristol, England

Professor Levitas is the author of The Concept of Utopia (1990); The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour (1998); The Ideology of the New Right (1986); Interpreting Official Statistics (1996); and articles on utopianism, politics and sociology. She is a founding member and previous convenor of the Utopian Studies Society in Britain.

Elizabeth McCutcheon
Professor Emerita of English, University of Hawaii

Professor McCutcheon is the author of the monograph My Dear Peter: The Ars Poetica and Hermeneutics for More's Utopia (1983), and co-editor of "Utopia Revisited," a 1994 special double issue of Moreana. Professor McCutcheon is currently reviewing bibliographies of Sir Thomas More for an essay in Utopian Studies.

Timothy Miller
Professor of Religious Studies, University of Kansas

Professor Miller is the author of five and editor of two books with utopian dimensions: Following in His Steps: A Biography of Charles M. Sheldon (1987); American Communes, 1860-1960: A Bibliography (1990); The Hippies and American Values (1991); The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America (volume one, 1900-1960), (1998); The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (1999); When Prophets Die: The Postcharismatic Fate of New Religious Movements (1991); and America's Alternative Religions (1995).

Raymond Polin
Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics, St. John's University

Professor Polin is the author of Marxian Foundations of Communism (1966), Modern Government and Constitutionalism (1979), and Plato and Aristotle on Constitutionalism (1998). He is currently working on a book entitled "Representative American Political Thought."

Kenneth Roemer
Professor, Department of English, University of Texas at Arlington

Professor Roemer is the author five books, including The Obsolete Necessity (1976), America as Utopia, ed. (1981) and Build Your Own Utopia (1981). He has just completed "Utopian Audiences: How Readers Place 'Nowhere'," which concludes with a fictional view of past utopian authors, scholars, reformers, and fictional characters from utopias visiting the Utopia exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and The New York Public Library.

Dan Sabia
Associate Professor, Department of Government and International Studies, University of South Carolina

Professor Sabia's recently published "Sitnalta, Lost Manuscript" examines the utopian society portrayed in an unpublished novel by Mulford Q. Sibley (1912-1989), a pioneer in promoting the study of utopias in the discipline of political science. His current research focuses on political judgment and on democratic theory and practice.

Lyman Tower Sargent
Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Professor Sargent is the editor of the journal Utopian Studies (1990-), the books Extremism in America (1995) and Political Thought in the United States (1997), and co-editor with Gregory Claeys of The Utopia Reader (1999). He is the author of British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (1988), and other books and numerous articles, mostly on aspects of utopianism.

Brian Stableford
Freelance Writer

Mr. Stableford is the author of seventy-five books (including fifty novels, at least a dozen of which qualify as utopias) and many contributions to reference books. His principal fields of academic and practical interest include the history and sociology of imaginative literature, the sociology of technology, and the art and craft of imaginative writing.

Darko Suvin
Emeritus Professor, McGill University

Professor Suvin is the author of ten books, including Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, (1979), Victorian Science Fiction in the U. K., (1983), Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988), many articles, two books of poetry, as well as the editor of a dozen volumes of essays.

Wilhelm Vosskamp
Professor and Director of the Center for Media and Cultural Communication, University of Cologne, Germany

Dr. Vosskamp's publications on Utopian Studies include Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinare Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie [The Search for Utopia] (1982). From 1978 to 1982, he was the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld, which sponsored a project on the functions of literary utopias.

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In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which a utopia could exist. Parallels to previous notions of utopian thought are discussed in "Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought.

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