With all the celebrating related to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 space mission, I have become nostalgic lately. I grew up on the Space Coast and was about five years old when Apollo 11 launched. I have a few academic articles, now probably a little dated since I wrote them back in 2009 and 2010, but I thought I’d blow off the dust and share them. (I own the copyrights.) One was published in a collection of essays, Florida in the Popular Imagination: Essays on the Cultural Landscape of the Sunshine State, and the other was a presentation I gave (very closely related to the article, so there is a lot of crossover between the two pieces) for the Florida College of English Association Conference held in Winter Park that year.

NASA Becomes Nostalgia: Retrospection and Prospects for Florida’s Space Coast

Florida’s Space Coast: Where Captain Kirk Meets John Glenn and Dreams Meet Possibilities