[6] She currently is a distinguished professor of English and cultural Analysis and Theory as well as founding director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, established in 1987 to promote interdisciplinary research and cross-university collaboration.
Another contribution of her is the creation of new sub-criteria of the already existing Sci-Fi genre relevant to the current era in which terrorism is a constant threat.
[11] Kaplan coined the term “Future-Sense Trauma Cinema”, a sub genre of the Science Fiction category, which target the human and natural causes of entire social disintegration, instead of the standard Sci-Fi procedure, forcing out ‘cultural anxieties’ into symbolizations of aliens attacking the Earth from outer space.
[14] The book shows the convoluted interaction of three levels of debates which in turn collectively focus the scope onto the cultural effort which futurist imaginaries put in.
[15] The first of which is the imagination of destroyed worlds on a social, political as well as natural level, linked with the problem of how human interference with nature has dramatically altered it through man made global warming; second, the contradiction between the delicate hope most of the genre movies endings and the obvious frailty of said hope; third, the scientific discourse reaching beyond the fictitious movies which claim that the human interference with the ecosystem have reached a point of no return.