Rate My Professor H. Bruce Franklin

H. Bruce Franklin served as the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies in the Literature faculty at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - Newark from 1975 to 2016, retiring as Professor Emeritus. He earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1955 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1961. Franklin's academic career included appointments at Stanford University (1961-1972), The Johns Hopkins University (1964-1965), Wesleyan University and Yale University (1974-1975). Prior to academia, he held labor positions as a factory worker and tugboat deckhand, and served as a navigator and intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command from 1956 to 1959, resigning his reserve captain commission in 1966 to protest the Vietnam War.

A pioneering scholar, Franklin introduced one of the first university courses on science fiction in 1961 and guest-curated the National Air and Space Museum's most popular exhibition, 'Star Trek and the Sixties' (1991). He authored or edited twenty books, including The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (1963), War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988), M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (1992), Prison Writing in 20th-Century America (1998), Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000), and The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America (2007). His research specializations included American cultural history, Vietnam War literature, prison literature, science fiction, technology and society, crime and punishment, and environmental issues like menhaden overfishing. Franklin published hundreds of articles in The New York Times, The Nation, Science, and other outlets. His honors include the Rutgers-Newark Provost's Distinguished Research Scholar Award (2007), American Studies Association's Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2008), Science Fiction Research Association Pioneer Award (1991), and Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (1981).