Pregnancy, Science Fiction, and the Medical Humanities

Anna McFarlane, research assistant on the Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project, discusses her new project. 

I am very pleased to announce that I have successfully been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship to start this October at the University of Glasgow. The project builds on many of the themes that we explored as part of the Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project and is entitled ‘Products of Conception: Pregnancy and Science Fiction, 1968-2015’. I’m planning to focus on British literary science fiction, but also to investigate science fiction as a discourse that might provide some means of expressing pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, and maternity in ways that are absent or suppressed in other medical narratives of maternity, such as those found in NHS advice or in pregnancy self-help literature. To that end, I will be looking at women’s non-fiction writing about pregnancy alongside science fiction literature and film.

I am excited to be joining the University of Glasgow on a full-time basis for the next three years and am very grateful to Dr Gavin Miller for being an excellent colleague during our time on Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, and a supportive mentor. Watch this space for further updates on the future of Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, news of our forthcoming short story collection, and all the other projects and events we are planning in the coming months.