Professor Amelia DeFalco

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in 2016 as University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities. Previously, I was a Banting postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada.

Research interests

My research concerns representations of ageing, care, vulnerability and the posthuman in contemporary cultural narratives. I have published three books related to this research, Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (2016), Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (2023) and co-edited the collection Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (2018).

In 2022 I led the AHRC Leadership Fellowship Imagining Posthuman Care, which investigated how representations of human/robot relationships imagine the ethical, political, and philosophical implications of nonhuman care. This project culminated in the exhibition “Can Robots Care?” at the Thackray Museum of Medicine.

I am a currently Co-PI on LivingBodiesObjects, a Wellcome Trust Research Development Award exploring technology and spaces of health (2022-2025), and Co-I on the Wellcome Collaborative Award Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (2020–2025). In these two projects, I lead research on cultural depictions of vulnerability, technology, and embodiment that theorize care beyond the human. As part of this work, I co-edited a special issue of Senses and Society on the topic “Affective Technotouch.”

My current research concerns posthuman approaches to care, vulnerability, materiality and touch. I’m also returning to my the topic of dementia care to consider how posthuman approaches might expand and complicate existing approaches. Recent publications on these topics can be found in Body and Society, Configurations, Critical Humanities and Ageing, and Mapping the Posthuman. I’ve also participated in podcasts, such as the BMJ MH podcast and Living with Feeling, and written blog posts on care robots and artificial wombs.

• Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures

Qualifications

• PhD (University of Toronto)
• MA (McMaster University)
• BA (University of Toronto)

Professional memberships

• Northern Network of Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR)
• European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS)
• North American Network of Aging Studies (NANAS)
• European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)

Student education

I teach core and option modules on twentieth-century literature, medical humanities, and animal studies in the School of English.

I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate researchers interested in critical medical humanities, especially representations of:

• ageing, dementia, disability, care
• biotech, robots, the posthuman
• affect theory and new materialism

Research groups and institutes

• Medical Humanities Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Neko Mellor
• Kerri Betts
• Liam Wilby
• Jo Rodgers
• Mary Dawson
• Ellie Wakeford