Featured Faculty
Thomas Moran
Other Degree Granting Units
THOMAS MORAN'S SCHOLARSHIP EFFORTS ARE MULTIDISCIPLINARY, CONSISTENT WITH HIS POSTING AS FACULTY WITHIN THE CENTER FOR MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES. HE HAS EXPLORED THE INTERSECTIONS OF ENGINEERING AND POETRY AND FICTION, THE SHORT BUT INFLUENTIAL TIMES OF A 1960'S ART GALLERY, AND THE PEDAGOGY OF TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION. IN ADDITION, HIS OWN CREATIVE WRITING CONTINUES TO APPEAR IN JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES.
His interest in creative writing arose when he was working as a research engineer at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He took a writing class taught by Lillian Richter, wife of Charles Richter, the physicist who developed the magnitude scale for earthquake intensity. Richter's class spurred him to continue writing short articles and stories while his engineering work in the aerospace industry had him preparing proposals, white papers, research articles, engineering specifications and procedures. Curious, he began to search out other engineers who also wrote poems, short stories and novels. Surprisingly, he discovered that some quite famous names in literature, including Mailer, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Heinlein, and Shute, had connections to the practice of engineering.
Moran has interviewed and written about many contemporary "literary" engineers, including Science Fiction Hall of Fame honoree Gene Wolfe, McArthur Fellowship awardee George Saunders, and popular novelists Steward O'Nan, Homer Hickam, and David Poyer. He wrote art criticism for the defunct magazine Art Voices and is currently preparing an article on the art and artists of Minneapolis' Bottega Gallery, as well as a series of articles on the filmmaker and artist Tom Sewell. His own fiction and creative non-fiction will appear in upcoming issues of literary journals such as Brevity and Cooweescoowee, as well as the anthology Rochester Rewritten.