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 literature and visual culture. My first monograph, The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. 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 emphasises cultural and biological contingency.

The next stage of my work on reproductive justice is a new project, ‘Narrating Pregnancy Sickness’, which explores the narrative temporalities of nausea and vomiting of pregnancy in relation to debates about the condition’s diagnosis and treatment. Through this research, I explore the cultural construction of pregnancy as a site for the making and unmaking of disability.

My work on reproduction has kindled a broader interest in the politics of concepts that resonate culturally and corporeally, which I am pursuing with ongoing research into literature and the medicalisation of attention. Publications arising from this research include an article, ‘Minimalism’s Attention Deficit: Distraction, Description, and Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever’, published in American Literary History in 2020, and a book chapter, ‘Diagnosing Deficit, Promising Enhancement: ADHD and Stimulants on Screen’, which was published in a book I co-edited with Martin Halliwell, The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (Edinburgh UP, 2022).

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.