Join the Global Engagement Seminar: Me and My Robot on Wednesday, February 28 between 7:00-8:30PM for a talk and Q&A presentation by Amelia DeFalco on Reading Robots.
Amelia DeFalco is a professor of contemporary literature and member of the Medical Humanities Research Group at the University of Leeds. Her work concerns posthuman approaches to care, vulnerability, materiality and touch in contemporary cultural narratives.
In 2022 DeFalco led the AHRC Leadership Fellowship “Imagining Posthuman Care,” which investigated how representations of human/robot relationships imagine the ethical, political, and philosophical implications of nonhuman care. She currently leads research on cultural depictions of vulnerability, technology, and embodiment that theorize care beyond the human in two Wellcome Trust-funded projects: “LivingBodiesObjects” (2022-2025) and “Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures” (2020-2025). As part of this work, DeFalco co-edited a special issue of Senses and Society on the topic of "Affective Technotouch.” DeFalco has appeared in podcasts such as the BMJ MH podcast and Living with Feeling, and written blog posts on care robots and artificial wombs. She has published three books: Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (2010); Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (2016); Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (2023); and co-edited the collection Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (2018).