{"id":119800,"date":"2018-11-01T16:33:33","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T20:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=119800"},"modified":"2026-02-19T09:50:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T14:50:18","slug":"look-what-we-found-an-alien-pop-up-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2018\/11\/01\/look-what-we-found-an-alien-pop-up-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Look What We Found: Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s alien pop-up book"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Walk into Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano\u2019s second floor Pettigrew office, and you\u2019ll enter an alien environment. Not that it\u2019s strange or different from other faculty offices. Rather, it\u2019s filled with objects connected to alien beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kelley-Romano, who teaches rhetorical theory and criticism, wrote her doctoral dissertation on \u201cThe Myth of Communion: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Narratives of Alien Abductees,\u201d in which she drew from 130 interviews with people who believe they\u2019ve been abducted by aliens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of her conclusions is that people who believe they\u2019ve been abducted have woven a collective myth that acts as a kind of religion, and she\u2019s at work at turning the dissertation into a book, What\u2019s Up: Alien Abductions and Why They Matter<\/em>, the outline of which appears on her office blackboard.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s outline of her book-in-progress, What\u2019s Up: Alien Abductions and Why They Matter<\/em>. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Today, Kelley-Romano\u2019s calling out a favorite pop-up book, Alien World: Fact or Fiction<\/em>, that includes three-dimensional paper presentations on aliens, UFOs, and the supposed 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, N.M., which birthed a wide variety of conspiracy theories about alien spaceship landings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This particular book, like many of the UFO-themed collectibles in her office, are gifts from her students, some of whom have taken the course she teaches on the rhetoric of alien abduction. \u201cBates has incredible academic freedom in terms of what we can teach,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After offering the course, she began to receive gifts from students, often from study abroad locations, who would discover all kinds of curiosities: alien root beer, condoms, rolling papers, dolls, soaps, and salt and pepper shakers, to name a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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(Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At top, some of the alien collectibles in Stephanie Kelley-Romano’s Pettigrew office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her gifts include non-alien items, including a piece of the University of Kansas basketball floor \u2014 she\u2019s a huge Jayhawks fan \u2014 and whatever the gifts, they often come from students with whom she enjoys longstanding connections. \u201cIt\u2019s a reminder, an acknowledgement of the fondness we have,\u201d she says, \u201cof the relationships that I\u2019ve created and maintained for almost 20 years now.\u201d She remembers how the mother of a student in her alien abduction course years ago quilted an alien blanket for her newborn son, who is now 16.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students often arrive in her classroom with one question: Does Kelley-Romano actually believe<\/em> in alien abduction? Subsequently they learn to ask better questions about how we create our belief systems. \u201cAlien abduction functions as a system of beliefs that offer a larger kind of metaphysical grounding,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen students take that understanding and apply it more broadly to systems of belief that are created through narratives and stories, they\u2019ll consider why we believe some stories and not others.\u201d They learn to critique and assess different arguments, including conspiracy arguments, how they work, and how we combat them \u2014a legitimate skill sadly necessary for their generation.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Kelley-Romano displays a spread from the pop-up book Alien World: Fact or Fiction<\/em>. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Kelley-Romano loves watching her students move \u201cfrom a place of bemused skepticism to the recognition of this is how we create truth.\u201d They spread their wings, set off to new universes, but their lives remain linked. And the gifts arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walk into Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":119919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,1,44,14,166,223,224,234,11009],"tags":[11321,10754,8163],"class_list":["post-119800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-batesnews","category-enewsletter","category-faculty-staff","category-humanities-history","category-slideshow","category-society-culture","category-teaching-education","category-the-college","tag-look-what-we-found","tag-rhetoric-film-and-screen-studies","tag-stephanie-kelley-romano"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119800"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172047,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119800\/revisions\/172047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}