Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg
Germany
fellow
Silvia Park
2026-2027
2027-2028
Home institution
Independent
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Humanities
Theme(s)
Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Silvia Park is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kansas and a Fellow of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Her speculative novel, Luminous (Simon & Schuster, 2025), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction and the Otherwise Award. Her fiction and criticism explore posthuman ethics, climate grief, and the intersections of science and speculative form. As a 2027–2028 "Fiction Meets Science" Writer-in-Residence at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, she is developing her second novel, Poor Unfortunate Fools, an archival science narrative examining marine ecology, postcolonial history, and speculative biology.
Research Project
Poor Unfortunate Fools
Poor Unfortunate Fools is a speculative literary novel that reimagines the mermaid as a marine mammal with cetacean intelligence. Told as a science memoir that combines field journals, research papers, institutional documents, and personal correspondence, the novel follows two young marine researchers whose investigation of a rare mermaid off the coast of Jeju Island in 1988 becomes a decades-long effort to study and protect a critically endangered species.
As they document the mermaid’s transformation from an orphaned juvenile into the matriarch of a surviving pod, the researchers confront the complexities of studying a species feared and misunderstood by humans, as well as the limits of science in the face of ecological collapse. Blending speculative biology with the traditions of nature writing, Poor Unfortunate Fools examines the profound paradox of devoting a lifetime to understanding a species while bearing witness to its disappearance
Research Interests:
Contemporary literature; speculative fiction; climate fiction; marine biology