Visiting Fellows

Dr Donna McCormack is currently Visiting Fellow in the Medical Humanities Research Centre.

Donna recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. She undertook her PhD in the School of English at the University of Leeds and has subsequently worked at Teesside University and the University of Leeds.

Donna is currently working on a monograph entitled Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Continuum Press). This project explores how memories of national and familial violence may be communicated through the body, specifically through the senses. It explores the ways in which trauma may be articulated without the use of narrative and how subsequent generations attempt to remember these unspoken memories. The book theorises the relationship between non-normativity (queer sexualities, genders and embodiments) and an intergenerational resistance to familial and colonial violence. The literary focus of the monograph is the works of Shani Mootoo, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Building on this interest in embodied memories, Donna has been working on a project that examines the interrelation of bodily and national borders in representations of organ transplantation. She is interested in how organ donation is an embodied metaphor for contemporary political anxieties, particularly concerning national belonging and transnational migration. The focus of this research is a set of contemporary literary and visual texts that grapple with issues of national hospitality, the relationship between self and other, and embodied ethics. Her research on biotechnologies is expanding into the field of medical authority, with a particular interest in how the acceptability of transplant therapies is gained through the public figure of the transplant surgeon, and the publication of transplant surgeon biographies and organ recipient memoirs.

She is a steering committee member of the Nordic Network for Gender, Body, Health and is Co-Investigator on the project Making Sense of Hysterectomy in the School of Medicine at the University of Oslo.