Zac Zimmer (Associate Professor of Literature) is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, culture and technology in the hemispheric Americas. His book First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. In addition to his current research on the infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC’s Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure.