Laura Shackelford
Assistant Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology.
My research centers on the questions digital media practices and the global social formations they enable pose to understandings of self, community, gender, race, and nation that were elaborated in an age of print. I am interested in theories of the posthuman as these raise crucial questions about the limits to various strains of humanism and encourage active and critical thinking about what's human about the human in the past, present, and future. I am especially interested in the contributions contemporary feminist and multicultural literature and theory and science fiction make to our understandings of the human as this work flags the shifting and often exclusionary practices that define and re-define the properly "human."
Recent work explores evolutionary narratives in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel, Middlesex, Wes Anderson's film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Vernor Vinge's novel, Rainbow's End; texts that examine and reimagine the interrelations between the human, animal, and machine and their reproduction in surprising, socially and politically thought-provoking ways.
(Source: faculty website, RIT)
