Tara B. M. Smith is an early-career interdisciplinary academic with a research focus on speculative fiction, new religious movements, popular culture, and ecology. Tara completed her thesis (2022) “The Social Praxis of Science Fiction: Pedagogies of Social Change,” at the University of Sydney Australia. Her thesis explored the power of speculative fiction to promote positive social change in society and incorporated social science methodologies and close readings of texts. She is currently working on a manuscript based on her thesis, “New Religious Movements as Expressed in Science Fiction,” with the Cambridge Elements series. In addition, she is co-principal investigator of the “Mental Sustainability of Long-Term Astronauts: Martian Scientific Odyssey and Astronautical Religion in Space Exploration,” which explores the effect of spirituality and religious belief on the mental health of astronauts. Education is an important element of Tara’s research career: in 2022 she completed her Graduate Certificate in Higher Education and she has taught extensively in a range of units from media studies, new religious movements, utopic fiction, writing studies and economics. Tara currently is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Spirituality and the Arts at the Center of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, currently researching religion in the science fiction universe of Warhammer 40,000.”
