Steampunk Scholar - A Five Year Mission

Welcome to Steampunk Scholar, a blog devoted to the PhD research of Mike Perschon, aka Gotthammer. The purpose of this blog will be to create an online annotated bibliography of sorts for my research. With each passing day, I find more links and more information than my bookmarks will hold until I begin the researching and writing of my dissertation project properly. I likely won't begin focusing on the research and writing until the fall of 2009, following my candidacy examinations. In the meantime, I need to start compiling my work, as well as maintaining an active line of communication with Steampunk communities online. This blog seemed the best way to do it.

My posts will consist of annotations concerning weblinks and peer-reviewed scholarship salient to my dissertation, which is Steampunk as aesthetic. I'm currently working on two papers for my fall semester of coursework: the first is the refined and expanded version of the research I presented at Steam Powered: The California Steampunk convention 2008 back in October on Captain Nemo as the original Steampunk hero; the second is a distillation of the Steampunk aesthetic as revealed in the numerous Steampunk Star Wars images on the web. My intention with both these papers is presentation, and ultimately publication.

Welcome to the project -- I hope what I share here benefits and advances other's research. Open source academia is the interdisciplinary wave of the future, I'm sure.