Mind Monkey Projects is a collection of some musical, scholarly, and poetry projects that I have worked on over the course of several years. My public presence has been associated mainly with my career in literary and film scholarship, but I have also been writing poetry and music, and performing on guitar, for most of my life. Some of my poems have been published in small magazines, and some of my songs have been recorded on CDs, but because I have no particular hunger for fame or money, have no ambitions to be an entertainer, and no love for self-promotion, my projects have been low key, lo-fi, and local. I have collected some of the work I am most proud of on this site so that they can be together in one place, a monkey village, available to folks who might be interested.

As for myself, I am the child of Hungarian political refugees who arrived in the US in 1949. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and attended college at the University of Pennsylvania and Bennington College. I received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. I began teaching English and World literature at DePauw University in 1983 and retired in 2020. I was a co-editor of Science Fiction Studies from 1991 until 2025. I co-founded and was managing editor of Humanimalia from 2008 to 2020. I have published widely on the history and aesthetics of science fiction, including two books, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2008) and Mutopia: Science Fiction and Fantastic Knowledge (University of Liverpool Press, 2022). Since retiring, I have been writing and maintaining a blog on classic Hollywood comedies, Comic Spirit: Notes on Classic Hollywood Comedies, 1930-1945, and compiling an archive of clips from those films on youtube at Comic Spirit.

I live in Bloomington, Indiana.