Gabriel Mckee is an author, librarian, curator, and researcher specializing in science fiction, religion, theology, bibliography/book history, and histories of the culture surrounding the paranormal(parahistoriography). His most recent book is The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT Press).
Shortly after graduating Harvard Divinity School in 2003, Mckee published his first book, an short analysis of the theology of science fiction author Philip K. Dick entitled Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (University Press of America, 2004). The Gospel According to Science Fiction, a broader analysis of religious themes in science fiction literature, film, and television followed in 2007. Mckee has continued to write on religious and theological themes in science fiction and other areas of popular culture, and in 2023 co-edited and contributed to Theology and the DC Universe (Lexington Books).
From 2010-2014, Mckee worked as an archivist at Boo-Hooray, a gallery and dealership specializing in the archives and print culture of the postwar counterculture. In this role, he assisted in over 30 exhibitions, publications, and archives related to a range of artists, authors, and cultural movements, including first-wave hip-hop, British punk and post-punk culture, post-Beat poetry, and the Situationist movement. At the same time, he began work as a bibliographic and curatorial consultant for private book and manuscript collectors; in this role, he has co-curated exhibitions on 19th century American literature, including major exhibitions on Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman at the Grolier Club.
In 2011, Mckee assisted with the editing and annotation of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson). He has been an active collaborator in the Zebrapedia project, a distributed scholarship project devoted to Dick’s extensive theological journal, and since 2024 has served as the project’s Managing Editor.
Since 2014, Mckee has worked in the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, providing research support to archaeologists and ancient historians. In this role, he co-organized the 2020 conference “Re-Rolling the Past: Representations and Reinterpretations of Antiquity in Analog and Digital Games.” He is an active contributor to and reviewer for the Pleiades project, a linked data gazetteer of ancient places.
In 2016, Mckee co-edited Jack Womack’s bibliographical compendium The Flying Saucers are Real: The UFO Library of Jack Womack (Anthology Editions). Further research on the bibliography of paranormal culture led to a focus on Gray Barker, author and operator of UFO book publisher Saucerian Books. Mckee’s latest book, The Saucerian, is a biography of Barker, with a particular emphasis on his publishing activities and their influence on the subcultures of UFO investigation and conspiracism.
Mckee’s current research includes the marketing and distribution of UFO books in the 1950s-1980s, the writing of Richard S. Shaver and the cultural reception of the Shaver Mystery, the theological content of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, and the writing of New Age author T. Lobsang Rampa.
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