David Thomas Shipko, Jr. is a scholar, theorist, and writer of fictions—speculative and mundane—against capitalist realism. He received his PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University, where he currently holds the position of Junior Lecturer. Across his academic career, David has taught literature and writing courses on topics including climate fiction and denial, cyberpunk, entropy and (endless) growth, artificial intelligence, and technological singularity. His writing has appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Science Fiction Studies, and Statement Magazine.

With his research, David examines the relationship between historical crises of late capitalism, social processes of mystification, and speculative cultural production across literature, film, and videogames. The Denialist Unconscious, his in-progress first book project, examines the production of climate change denial within speculative novels, films, and video games. A second monograph project, tentatively titled The Solarpunk Symptom: The Automatic Fetish of Green Energy Transition, will interrogate the constitutive contradictions of solarpunk, developing a critical re-consideration of its utopianism, and exploring how its narrative, aesthetic, and affective structures engage discourses of green energy (de)mystification. He is also conducting research on the narrative and symbolic means by which speculative texts mediate “artificial intelligence” as a process of the transformation of living labor into dead labor.

After receiving his BA in Cinema-Television Production at the University of Southern California, he worked as a production assistant on music videos, commercials, television content, and live-action and animated feature films by artists and studios both independent and major, while also serving as an infantry officer in the California Army National Guard.

He received his M.A. in English from California State University, Los Angeles, where he also taught first-year writing. For his thesis, he wrote a 550-page science fiction novel about class struggle across the universe, titled Worlds to Win, and a critical introduction historicizing and theorizing its politico-aesthetic interventions.