糖心视频

Dr Donna McCormack

Senior Lecturer

English & Creative Writing

Contact

Personal statement

I am the principal investigator on the British Academy (BA) funded project . This project is funded as part of their strand entitled . This project uses arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies. Working with the community organisation , we will produce a digital exhibition of disability stories from marginalised LGTBQ communities. We will also work with disabled artists from across various geographical sites to develop understandings of how speculative arts may disrupt and challenge disability injustice. We explore what disability futures are possible.

More broadly, my research is situated at the intersection of post- and anti-colonial studies, queer theory, and the medical humanities. In much of my work I formulate post- and anti-colonial, critical race and queercrip ways of analysing contemporary fiction in order to both critique systems of violence and to open up space for imagining what is possible. My focus is the body in the context of health and illness and trauma studies. I work across literatures from North Africa, the Caribbean and Canada. I am currently working on a monograph entitled Vital Death: Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Fiction.

I recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship on Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics, which focused on organ transplantation in contemporary fiction. My long-standing interest in organ transplantation in memoirs and fiction (novels and films) is both a concern with how narratives of transplantation may be reimagined, and an analysis of how new bodily imaginaries may offer alternative ways of thinking belonging, community and nation. Indeed, this intersection of visceral body and community boundaries is at the heart of my research.

My first book Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Bloomsbury 2014) examined the relation between familial and national violence and trauma in Moroccan, Canadian and Trinidadian literatures. Exploring how trauma may be passed on through the generations without language and through the use of the senses, this book offers a theory of sensory knowledge as a mode of bearing witness to unspeakable and unspoken familial and national traumas. It explores the endless collective work necessary to remember these often silenced histories.

I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the . I have written on Richard Goldschmidt鈥檚 theory of hopeful monsters, and I am interested in alternative evolution theories as forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-homo- and transphobic resistance. I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.

I am currently the coordinator of the .

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Prize And Awards

Recipient
2022

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Publications

(2025)
Miller Gavin, McFarlane Anna,
(2025)
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Vol 10, pp. 1鈥12 (2024)
, Hellstrand Ingvil, Orning Sara, Koistinen Aino-Kaisa
Monstrosity and Global Crisis in Transnational Film, Media and Literature (2024) (2024)
, Zakhour Lynne, Kahwagi Richard, Young Ingrid
Ars Medica Vol 17, pp. 23鈥27 (2023)
Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism (2022) (2022)

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Professional Activities

Organiser
24/11/2024
Participant
16/4/2024
Invited speaker
27/6/2022
Participant
21/10/2021
Organiser
1/3/2021

Projects

Lewis, Francesca (Researcher) McCormack, Donna (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2024 - 31-Jan-2026
McCormack, Donna (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2023 - 30-Jan-2027
McCormack, Donna (Co-investigator)
What monsters roam the Anthropocene? And how might they help us understand our current moment? Drawing on feminist theory, decolonial theory, queer theory and critical disability studies, the Monsters of the Anthropocene collaboratory invites creative and critical engagements with the figure of the monster in order to address questions of power, vulnerability and othering in the Anthropocene.
01-Jan-2021 - 31-Jan-2023
McCormack, Donna (Co-investigator) Young, Ingrid (Co-investigator)
15-Jan-2020
McCormack, Donna (CoI) Halstead, Jill (Principal Investigator)
Social Acoustics focuses on the potentialities of sound鈥檚 relational, material and artistic qualities. In particular, the project engages sound as a productive medium for nurturing collaboration and an ethics of radical openness, and for challenging models of knowledge and agency defined by the apparent, the legible and the quantifiable.

Sounds are deeply relational enabling gestures of compassion and sharing as well as disruption and cacophony. Social Acoustics asks how forms of sonic practice might contribute to contemporary struggles exploring if there are particular discourses on embodiment and community to be drawn from the experiences of audition. Might certain affordances be garnered by way of sonic knowledge, particularly to challenge what Isabell Lorey terms 鈥済overning through insecurity鈥 prevalent today?
01-Jan-2020 - 31-Jan-2022
McCormack, Donna (Principal Investigator)
01-Jan-2018 - 15-Jan-2021

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Contact

Dr Donna McCormack
Senior Lecturer
English & Creative Writing

Email: donna.mccormack@strath.ac.uk
Tel: Unlisted