FERRUM, VA, October 27, 2025 — On Wednesday, October 29, Ferrum College’s Inquiring Minds series will feature “Worlds Gone Wrong: What Is Dystopian Literature and Why Should You Know About It?” Professor of English Lana A. Whited will lead a discussion of the increasing popularity of literature about terrible fictional places and her new English course on The Dystopian Tradition. The program is free and open to the public.
Inquiring Minds offers lively, informal presentations and activities on various interesting topics for the entire community. Stanley Library at Ferrum College presents the series on most Wednesdays during the academic year, in the LEaP Studio on the library’s main floor during the campus’s community hour from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Whited’s presentation will ask the audience to consider what they would do if the world seemed to be falling apart. “For over 100 years, writers and filmmakers have imagined catastrophes of various types (political, medical, etc.) and how to survive them,” wrote Whited. Imaginative works created by these artists are labelled dystopian, and “dystopia” literally means “bad place” because a dystopian world is no place you’d want to live.
Whited will offer The Dystopian Tradition, a general studies literature course (English 216), for the first time in the spring 2026 semester. This summer she broadened her knowledge of the topic by taking a virtual course on dystopian literature.
The new course will discuss the development of dystopian literature since the Industrial Revolution as a response to fictional utopias that formally began with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). The class will consider a variety of historical and current “what if?” thought experiments, including classic films such as Metropolis (1927), literary works such as 1984 (1949), The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), and The Hunger Games (2008). Students will explore the specific conditions that inspire dystopian narratives, the general warnings inherent in these narratives, and the broad trends in utopian and dystopia works over time.
“No period in my lifetime feels better suited to the study of dystopian literature than the present,” wrote Whited. “In our country as in many, it is a time of instability, fear, and fractured relationships. The growth of artificial intelligence technologies must feel to us like the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, as early dystopian novels and films examined questions similar to our own: What does it mean to be human at a time when machines seem to dominate our lives and conflict threatens us in communities large and small? What happens if the environment collapses? If a virus becomes global? If our families are dispersed beyond our homes? And although dystopian works seem bleak in their outlook, they also identify sources of hope and inspiration that should not be ignored by anyone seeking to make a difference.”
Whited, who has published widely on the Harry Potter series of books and films, is also the editor of Critical Insights: The Hunger Games Trilogy, published by Grey House in 2016. In addition to several pieces by Whited, the book includes essays by Ferrum College’s Professor of English Tina Hanlon, Dr. Sandra Via ‘04, and Ms. Laurie Adams ’12, the director of grants and foundation relations.
On October 2, Whited and Hanlon gave a presentation at the Franklin County Library in Rocky Mount on “Scary Stories,” which included a brief discussion of dystopian literature.
In 2020, Whited’s book Murder, In Fact: Disillusionment and Death in the American True Crime Novel was published by McFarland. She led a series of group discussions about nonfiction books at the Franklin County Library in Rocky Mount last winter, and will lead another book group focusing on feminist dystopian literature at the library early in 2026.
