Ellie Wakeford
- Email: en13ew@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: Representations of surveillance and embodiment in contemporary Science Fiction
- Supervisors: Stuart Murray, Professor Amelia DeFalco
Profile
I joined the University of Leeds as an undergraduate in 2013 before completing an MSc in Medical Humanities at King’s College London in 2019. In 2021 I returned to Leeds as a PhD researcher on the Wellcome Trust sponsored project Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures. My research explores representations of surveillance technologies in contemporary speculative and science fiction texts, visual art, and performance and their impact on understandings and experiences of personhood and embodiment. My project is supervised by Professor Stuart Murray and Dr. Amelia DeFalco and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Research interests
- Contemporary speculative and science fiction
- Posthumanism and new materialist theory
- Medical humanities
- Embodiment
- Digital technologies
I am interested in exploring the boundaries of the body, its entanglements with organic and inorganic matter across material and virtual networks, and how this impacts our understandings out personhood and what it means to be ‘human’. My PhD thesis focuses on the impact of surveillance technologies and Big Data on embodied experience and concepts of self, agency, and autonomy.
Conference papers
Wakeford E (2022), ‘Contagious (in)visibility: surveillance and vanishing in pandemic times’, Medical (Post) Humanities?: Reassessing and Reimagining the Human.
Internet publications
Wakeford E (2022), ‘Round-up: Everyday embodiment and technology in speculative and science fiction’, symposium write-up
Wakeford E (2021), ‘Vanishing and Surveillance in Pandemic Times’, itDf blog
Wakeford E (2020), ‘Marianna Simnett: Contagion and Monstrous Politics’, Clot Magazine
Wakeford E (2020), ‘Marianna Simnett: Contagion and the Utopian Body’, Clot Magazine
Awards
University of Leeds Embodiment and Disability in Speculative and Science Fiction Scholarship, supported by the Wellcome Trust (April 2021 - )
Wellcome Master’s Award in Humanities and Social Science (2018 – 19)
Qualifications
- MSc Medical Humanities, King's College London
- BA (Hons) English Literature, University of Leeds