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Anna Stenning

  • Position: Wellcome Research Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Areas of expertise: Critical medical humanities; life writing; nature writing; 20th-century British poetry; ecocriticism; environmental fiction; disability studies; critical autism studies
  • Email: A.C.Stenning@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 1690
  • Website: Twitter | Researchgate | ORCID

Profile

I’m currently working on the three-year Wellcome Trust Fellowship on the project ‘Remembering what really matters’: nature, culture and autism. 

I joined the University of Leeds in August 2020. Previously, I was a research fellow at Bath Spa University where I also taught English literature (literature and the environment) between 2018–2019.  My PhD explored the literary friendship of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost in the context of the time they spent together in Gloucestershire between 1912 and 1917. 

Responsibilities

  • Research fellow

Research interests

My current research explores the representation of autism in life writing by autistic authors, in the context of the recent clinical and cultural framings of autism. I am interested in what this teaches us about life writing and the autobiographical construction of selfhood, and how these texts contribute to greater agency and cultural acceptance for autistic and otherwise stigmatized groups.  

I am currently writing about material and cultural entanglement and how we construct meaning from our lives. This is part of my long-standing interest in overcoming dualistic understandings of what it is to be human, inspired by feminist science studies. My work explores how literary culture – taking its cue from cognitive psychology – privileges a narrow concept of the ideal human subject that is based on Anthropocentric and Eurocentric ideology.

I have recently co-edited the collection of essays on walking as an artistic practice in the context of the Anthropocene, Walking, Landscape and Environment (Routledge 2019). 

I’m the co-editor of Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge 2020). My first single-authored book was Edward Thomas: A Miscellany (2016) and I am currently working on a monograph study on autism and life writing. 

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD (English Literature) - University of Worcester, 2015
  • MA (Literature, Science and the Environment) - University of Essex, 2010
  • BA Hons (Philosophy) - King's College London, 1999

Professional memberships

  • Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
  • Member of ASLE-UKI