Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities

Writing the Weird Future: Meagan Arthur

Meagan Arthur arrived at the University of Utah's Ph.D. program in English Literature and Creative Writing with a reader's instincts and a theorist's ambition—a combination that has made her a compelling figure in her department and earned her the prestigious Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities.

Now a fourth-year doctoral candidate, Arthur is at work on a novel that sits at the intersection of science fiction, climate fiction and what theorist Elvia Wilk calls "the new weird"—a genre of ecosystems literature that refuses the old boundary between the biological and the conceptual, insisting that how we know the world and how the world actually works are entangled systems, not separate concerns.

Arthur describes her dissertation as "a novel that follows a lineage of science and climate fiction, … that recognizes the interdependence of biological and epistemological systems." At its heart, the project asks what it means to be a human—and an economic subject — in a world remade by climate and technology. Her animating question, in her own words, is how to "re-weird a vision of the future of those technologies as narratological tools": to imagine digital systems not as cold infrastructure but as instruments for making meaning and telling stories.

Her intellectual formation has been deeply cross-disciplinary. Novelists like Olga Tokarczuk, Matt Bell, Emily St. John Mandel, Ling Ma and Mohsin Hamid sit alongside theorists like Seo-Young Chu, Donna Haraway, and Wilk herself. As Arthur puts it: "Reading theory alongside these novels is what has given my ideas shape"—a deceptively simple statement perhaps but one that describes a genuinely rigorous practice.

That rigor shows in her creative output. In the past year alone, Arthur has published fiction in the Bridport Prize Anthology, River Styx, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Waxwing, and American Literary Review—a publication record that would be notable for any writer, let alone one mid-dissertation.

Her service to the department is equally remarkable. She has served as prose editor of Quarterly West, the university's online literary magazine; reads for Western Humanities Review, its flagship print journal; and co-coordinates Working Dog, the graduate student reading series. A Digital Matters Fellow this past semester, she embodies a rare combination: the writer who also builds the literary ecosystem others depend on.

Her hero, she says without hesitation, is her dissertation chair, Lindsey Drager—"a writer I have admired for years." The feeling, one suspects, is mutual.

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Shell Game: John Flynn and the Hidden Costs of the Cold War West

John Flynn came to the history of the American West the way the best historians do—by following a thread that refused to stop unraveling. What began as research into the militarization of Utah and Nevada during World War II led the sixth-year Ph.D. candidate deep into the Cold War, and into a question that still echoes in debates over land use, Indigenous sovereignty, and the relationship between citizens and their government: who decides what "worthless" land is worth

Flynn, a recipient of the Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities, is at work on a dissertation that examines "the political economy of Cold War militarization and its enduring impact on land-use conflicts and citizen-government dynamics." It’s a project that bridges environmental history, Indigenous studies, oral history and public policy. While sweeping in scope Flynn nevertheless holds an intimate attention to the people caught between federal ambition and desert landscapes that the government called wasteland. "I don't think they're worthless," Flynn notes of the Great Basin's arid lands. "I love the desert."

His dissertation turns on three case studies, each a different facet of the same collision between federal power and Western resistance. The first examines Downwinders—civilians sickened by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing—and the Western Shoshone people, who fought side by side against a government that treated their homeland as an expendable proving ground.

The second centers on arguably one of the most surreal chapters in Cold War history: the proposed MX Missile system. In 1979, the federal government planned to place 200 nuclear missiles across Utah and Nevada—not hidden in fixed bunkers, but constantly moving along hundreds of miles of track. As Flynn describes it, "The logic was that Soviets would never know exactly where the missiles were—think of it like a massive shell game, just with nuclear warheads." The plan would have consumed an area larger than the state of Washington. It never happened, in no small part because of a treaty with the Western Shoshone, more than a century old, asserting that the Tribe had never relinquished its homeland.

The third case study examines the bitter debate over siting a nuclear waste repository on the reservation of the Skull Valley Goshute—another chapter in the long story of who bears the costs of national security.

Flynn brings unusual practical depth to this work. Alongside his academic research, he works as a historical consultant—drafting treaty reports for Native American tribes, collecting oral histories and providing historical research for litigation. It is scholarship that has consequences beyond the footnote.

Recipient of many fellowships—including the Alan K. Simpson Fellowship in Western Political History, the Charles Redd Fellowship in Western American Studies, and a Littleton-Griswold Research Grant from the American Historical Association—Flynn has already established himself as a significant voice in the field. When he isn't in the archive, he can be found climbing or running Utah's public lands with his dog Daisy. You could say he’s a researcher who studies the West by living in it on two legs (or four, vicariously, if you count Daisy’s).