Fiona Kelleghan

Who is Fiona Kelleghan?

Fiona Kelleghan is an American academic and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy. She was a metadata librarian and a cataloguer at the University of Miami's Otto G. Richter Library. She left the University in 2011 due to suffering chronic pain and the subsequent unavoidable absenteeism.

Writing in The Washington Post, critic Michael Dirda called her "an expert on humor in genre fiction," and she was listed on the University of Miami's website as its official expert on "Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror." She is also interested in film both inside and outside the science-fiction genre, and is an amateur ethologist.

She has identified a secular, satiric literary movement within the science-fiction genre that she calls "Savage Humanism." Her critical anthology The Savage Humanists begins with a 17,000-word essay by her describing the movement and its practitioners, and collects stories by Gregory Frost, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Jonathan Lethem, James Morrow, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, Tim Sullivan, and Connie Willis, with introductions to each by Kelleghan. That essay, "A Definition of Savage Humanism, with Autobiographical Anecdotes," is reprinted as the cover story in the November 2008 edition of The New York Review of Science Fiction, and takes up most of that issue of the magazine.