Amelia DeFalco is a University Academic Fellow in Medical Humanities in the School of English, University of Leeds. She is the author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2016), along with essays on contemporary cultural representations of aging, dementia, disability, and care.
Before joining Leeds, DeFalco was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University where she taught and conducted research on contemporary literature and film, and medical humanities. While at McMaster, she was awarded the 2009 Polanyi Prize for Literature, given by the Ontario provincial government to outstanding early-career researchers, as well as a SSHRC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Her current research project, Curious Kin: Fictions of Posthuman Care, investigates non-human care, both actual and imagined. This work examines representations of companion animals and robots in literature, film, television, and digital media to explore how posthuman dependencies might transform our understanding of “humane” care and the human. In support of this project, she is the organizer of the "Future of Care Initiative” at Leeds, a collaborator in the Wellcome-funded "Augmented Selves" project (@augmentedbodies), and co-convener of the Leeds Sadler Seminar series “Touch: Sensing, Feeling, Knowing.”