Sonja Fritzsche is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Administration in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University where she has served since January 1, 2024. She is able to pursue highly meaningful, values-driven work together with dedicated colleagues. In this new role, she oversees academic affairs, Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities, and the Excel Network in the College as well as continue to support the Dean in non-tenure stream promotion and tenure system reappointment, promotion, and tenure review. She continues to share knowledge and expand opportunities via the Culture of Care initiative and Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership (CPIL) model. In her most recent Academic Personnel and Administration position (2017-2023) in the College, she focused on equitable and inclusive searches and faculty review procedures, College-wide faculty development and leadership initiatives that employ “transformative listening” (ADFL Bulletin 2022), creating habits of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the College, and non-tenure stream mentoring and career pathways

Fritzsche’s intellectual leadership includes mentorship and stewardship as President of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages in 2015, as past Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association, and currently on the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Women in German. She is author of Science Fiction Literature in East Germany (Peter Lang Oxford, 2006), editor of The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (Liverpool UP, 2014/pbk. and ebook 2021), and co-editor of Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (Peter Lang Oxford, 2018) with Anindita Banerjee and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2023) with Lisa Yaszek, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson. Her current project takes a critical health humanities approach to affect and autism life writing. See her full bio at the link above.