Staff

Postdoctoral Tutors

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Claire McKechnie

Tutor

Claire.McKechnie@ed.ac.uk

Outline Biography

Claire McKechnie graduated with a PhD from the Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh in 2011 and has been teaching English and Scottish literature and the Medicine in Literature course for medical students there for several years. She previously gained degrees from Glasgow and Hull. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where she is undertaking a new project entitled Cancer and the Victorian Literary Imagination, and she is also teaching on the Masters course 'The Gothic Imagination' at the University of Stirling. She is currently co-guest editing a special issue of The Journal of Victorian Culture entitled ‘New Perspectives on Animals in Victorian Culture’. Her principal research interests lie in the Gothic and the literary history and scientific / medical culture of Victorian Britain, and she is author of several articles on the interrelationship between science, literature and culture.

Research Interests

Claire’s PhD research examines the role of animals in Victorian Gothic fiction and nineteenth-century (medical) science. Her thesis explores the function of the dog, the frog, the dinosaur, the spider, and the ‘freak’ in the interaction between nineteenth-century scientific and literary culture. Claire’s wider interests include Gothic science fiction and the interrelationship between science, literature, and culture; lesser-known Victorian writers; the supernatural in literature; post colonialism and late Victorian adventure fiction; illness in literature; and Victorian medical science.

Publications

Publications list for Claire McKechnie

Teaching

Tutor in English and Scottish Literature
Lecturer and course organiser in Literature and Medicine

This article was published on Sep 12, 2011