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Dr Anna McFarlane

British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Anna.Mcfarlane@glasgow.ac.uk
http://www.glasgow.academia.edu/AnnaMcfarlane

Biography

Anna McFarlane is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her project, entitled 'Products of Conception: Science Fiction and Pregnancy, 1968-Present', looks at the use of science fiction discourses in discussions about the traumatic or monstrous side of pregnancy. She was the research assistant on the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project at the University of Glasgow and held a Wellcome Trust Small Grants Award for a project entitled ‘Nursing, Reproduction, and Writing: Naomi Mitchison’s Science Fiction as Activism’. She was awarded her PhD from the University of St Andrews for a thesis concerning the role of gestalt psychology in William Gibson’s science fiction novels. She is the co-editor of Vector: The Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2016).

Research and Teaching Interests

My thesis focused on gestalt psychology and posthumanism, and these will be important components of my first monograph. I am interested in the ways medicine is used or changed by debates about posthumanism and the future of the humanities.

Keywords:

• Creative writing
• Embodiment
• Gender
• History of medicine
• Illness narratives
• Literature
• Literature and medicine
• Malcolm Ferguson-Smith
• Metaphor
• Monsters
• Pregnancy
• Prenatal testing
• Psychology
• Science fiction
• Stillbirth

Projects:

• Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

Units:

• College of Arts, School of Critical Studies