Anna McFarlane
Birkbeck College, University of London, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Attended Birkbeck Critical Theory Summer School, 2011
'Dr McFarlane here has a PhD on William Gibson's science fiction novels. So she's a whole lot like some character FROM a Gibson novel, but it's been resolved on some higher analytical level.' - Bruce Sterling
I am the James Murray Beattie Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome Trust-funded Future of Human Reproduction project at the University of Lancaster. I am the author of Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades, a monograph on William Gibson’s novels. I have also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture and Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (with Lars Schmeink and Graham J. Murphy) and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (with Christos Callow Jr). Prior to taking up my role at Glasgow I was a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds 2022-24.
My current research is an interdisciplinary medical humanities project on the portrayal of traumatic pregnancy in genre fiction, and the use of genre motifs in women’s writing about pregnancy. This research has been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
I was a research assistant on the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project at the University of Glasgow, alongside Gavin Miller (2015-17), during which time I held a Wellcome Trust Small Grant Award.
I hold a PhD from the University of St Andrews where I was supervised by Dr Sarah Dillon and my external examiner was Dr Stefan Herbrechter. I have taught English literature survey courses, fantasy literature, modern literature, and contemporary literature at the Masters level, a continuing education course on Scottish literature, and Honours modules on science fiction, literary theory, contemporary literature, posthumanism, postcolonialism, and literature and medicine.
Supervisors: Dr. Sarah Dillon
I am the James Murray Beattie Lecturer in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Collaborator on the Wellcome Trust-funded Future of Human Reproduction project at the University of Lancaster. I am the author of Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades, a monograph on William Gibson’s novels. I have also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture and Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (with Lars Schmeink and Graham J. Murphy) and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays (with Christos Callow Jr). Prior to taking up my role at Glasgow I was a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds 2022-24.
My current research is an interdisciplinary medical humanities project on the portrayal of traumatic pregnancy in genre fiction, and the use of genre motifs in women’s writing about pregnancy. This research has been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
I was a research assistant on the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project at the University of Glasgow, alongside Gavin Miller (2015-17), during which time I held a Wellcome Trust Small Grant Award.
I hold a PhD from the University of St Andrews where I was supervised by Dr Sarah Dillon and my external examiner was Dr Stefan Herbrechter. I have taught English literature survey courses, fantasy literature, modern literature, and contemporary literature at the Masters level, a continuing education course on Scottish literature, and Honours modules on science fiction, literary theory, contemporary literature, posthumanism, postcolonialism, and literature and medicine.
Supervisors: Dr. Sarah Dillon
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Books by Anna McFarlane
The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk.
This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.
By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical, as well as on an aesthetic, level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts.
Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.
With technology seamlessly integrated into our lives and our selves, and social systems veering towards globalization and corporatization, cyberpunk has become a ubiquitous cultural formation that dominates our twenty-first century techno-digital landscapes. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary science fiction form to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television, and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, as the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, and empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking, as much as differentiating, our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world.
With original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds, this critical reference will be of significant interest to humanities students and scholars of media, cultural studies, literature, and beyond.
It's an excellent idea to gather a book of essays about the work of Adam Roberts. His novels are so various and brilliant that it's a pleasure to discuss them in depth, as it is with the work of any gifted artist following a singular path. This volume clarifies parts of Roberts' project while deepening mysteries elsewhere in it just what one wants from literary criticism. -- Kim Stanley Robinson
Adam Roberts has long been regarded as one of contemporary science fiction's most innovative, and overlooked, writers. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays makes an excellent intervention in addressing this critical lacuna, yielding productive insights into the startling inventiveness of his texts, their rich intertextuality, ludic playfulness, and, more recently, political response to a post-Occupy world. Roberts's novels and parodies themselves have much to teach us about the science fiction tradition, and these essays rightfully position his work as among the best of twenty-first-century writing in the speculative mode. --Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Roberts is at once the cleverest and wittiest of contemporary science fiction writers. This dazzling collection of essays shows how cleverness is his topic as well as his technique, and how his wit both mocks and accentuates the prodigious intelligence that marks every page of his work. I haven't read a more perceptive or entertaining tribute to a living author. --Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow
When the history of 21st-century science fiction is written, Adam Roberts will be remembered as this era's H. G. Wells. --Damien Walter, Writer, Columnist for The Guardian, Writing teacher.
Adam Roberts's fiction gives us an education in sf's history and traditions while he merrily deconstructs them. Add to that the way his criticism is laced with humour, and it's only appropriate that a collection devoted to his work should tease its subject a little. Even as they open up the suggestion that Roberts is one of our most important writers, these essays amuse as well as inform. If sf is to survive it's going to need more people like Roberts, and this collection tells us why! --Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Collections Librarian, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Anna McFarlane
Chapters in Edited Collections by Anna McFarlane
Rebecca Ann Smith, Anne Charnock’s Arthur C. Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017)
and Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017)—critiques the state of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which has been
subject to defunding and privatization over a number of decades. This is already a feminist issue with consequences for
reproductive health through the rationing of in vitro fertilization (IVF). These science fiction texts are placed in the context of British
texts on ectogenesis and eugenics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and contemporary feminist debates about the
potential value of ectogenesis for women’s liberation.
The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk.
This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.
By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical, as well as on an aesthetic, level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson’s work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts.
Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.
With technology seamlessly integrated into our lives and our selves, and social systems veering towards globalization and corporatization, cyberpunk has become a ubiquitous cultural formation that dominates our twenty-first century techno-digital landscapes. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary science fiction form to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television, and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, as the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, and empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking, as much as differentiating, our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world.
With original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds, this critical reference will be of significant interest to humanities students and scholars of media, cultural studies, literature, and beyond.
It's an excellent idea to gather a book of essays about the work of Adam Roberts. His novels are so various and brilliant that it's a pleasure to discuss them in depth, as it is with the work of any gifted artist following a singular path. This volume clarifies parts of Roberts' project while deepening mysteries elsewhere in it just what one wants from literary criticism. -- Kim Stanley Robinson
Adam Roberts has long been regarded as one of contemporary science fiction's most innovative, and overlooked, writers. Adam Roberts: Critical Essays makes an excellent intervention in addressing this critical lacuna, yielding productive insights into the startling inventiveness of his texts, their rich intertextuality, ludic playfulness, and, more recently, political response to a post-Occupy world. Roberts's novels and parodies themselves have much to teach us about the science fiction tradition, and these essays rightfully position his work as among the best of twenty-first-century writing in the speculative mode. --Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, University of London
Adam Roberts is at once the cleverest and wittiest of contemporary science fiction writers. This dazzling collection of essays shows how cleverness is his topic as well as his technique, and how his wit both mocks and accentuates the prodigious intelligence that marks every page of his work. I haven't read a more perceptive or entertaining tribute to a living author. --Dr Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow
When the history of 21st-century science fiction is written, Adam Roberts will be remembered as this era's H. G. Wells. --Damien Walter, Writer, Columnist for The Guardian, Writing teacher.
Adam Roberts's fiction gives us an education in sf's history and traditions while he merrily deconstructs them. Add to that the way his criticism is laced with humour, and it's only appropriate that a collection devoted to his work should tease its subject a little. Even as they open up the suggestion that Roberts is one of our most important writers, these essays amuse as well as inform. If sf is to survive it's going to need more people like Roberts, and this collection tells us why! --Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Collections Librarian, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library
Rebecca Ann Smith, Anne Charnock’s Arthur C. Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017)
and Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017)—critiques the state of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which has been
subject to defunding and privatization over a number of decades. This is already a feminist issue with consequences for
reproductive health through the rationing of in vitro fertilization (IVF). These science fiction texts are placed in the context of British
texts on ectogenesis and eugenics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and contemporary feminist debates about the
potential value of ectogenesis for women’s liberation.
This play report brings together a playthrough of the game with Anna McFarlane, whose research interests draw upon the medical humanities, science fiction and cyberpunk, broadcaster and architect Andrea González and artist and writer Daniel Sean Kelly.
This video is part of the Universes programme run by Leicester Gallery at De Montfort University, a series of online talks and and films from artists and writers exploring ideas of universe creation as a mode of contemporary arts practice. More information at http://thegallery.dmu.ac.uk/universes/