Michael Austin Pitts

Professor Michael Pitts is a lecturer at the University of New York in Prague and director of the Media Studies and English Language programs. His academic focus encompasses 20th- and 21st-century U.S. literature, with a particular emphasis on African American fiction, science fiction, utopian studies, masculinity studies, queer theory, horror fiction, and literature of the American South.

In 2021, Professor Pitts published his first monograph, Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man, through Lexington Books. Beyond this monograph, Professor Pitts has contributed scholarly articles to various academic journals including Extrapolation and the European Journal of American Studies.

He additionally served as co-editor of Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2025. His second monograph, which concerns Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2026.

In addition to his research and teaching, Professor Pitts serves as the fiction reviews editor for the SFRA Review, an academic journal dedicated to science fiction studies.