Sophie Jones

I joined Strathclyde in 2020 as Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies. My research interests are in post-1945 US literature and film, gender, disability, and the critical medical humanities. I gained my BA from the University of Manchester, my MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and my PhD from Birkbeck, University of London. Since completing my PhD, I have held postdoctoral research fellowships at Birkbeck and the University of Leeds. Outside academia, I have worked as a bookseller, copywriter, tutor, and literary agent’s assistant.

My research looks broadly at the relationship between the politics of the body and post-1945 US literature and visual culture. My first monograph, The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973, is under contract with Edinburgh University Press in the ‘Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century’ series. The book explores how writers and filmmakers of the long 1960s—including Lorraine Hansberry, Stan Brakhage, and Sylvia Plath—developed a politics of reproduction that drew together the term’s cultural and biological senses.

This work on reproduction kindled a broader interest in the politics of concepts that resonate culturally and corporeally, which I am pursuing with my current book project, The Minimal and the Maximal: Contemporary American Literature and the Medicalization of Attention. Informed by feminist theory and critical disability studies, the book traces how the development of attention disorders as a diagnostic category has intersected with understandings of ‘minimalism’ and ‘maximalism’ as literary strategies for extending, curtailing, testing or enhancing contemporary habits of attention and distraction. The first publication drawn from this project is an article, ‘Minimalism’s Attention Deficit: Distraction, Description, and Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever’, published in American Literary History in 2020. Alongside this project, I am currently co-editing (with Martin Halliwell) The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health, a 40-chapter volume under contract with Edinburgh University Press.

My research has been funded by the AHRC and the Wellcome Trust.  

I teach English at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and on the MSc in Applied Gender Studies.