Ellena Deeley

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College: College of Humanities
Discipline: English
Department: English

Dr Ellena Deeley holds an AHRC-funded PhD in English at the University of Exeter. Her thesis, Contested Subjects: The Configuration of Conjoined Twins in Contemporary World Literature and Screen Media, draws on the lenses of critical disability studies, STS and postcolonial studies to explore how the narrativization of conjoined twins in diverse media forms raises complex questions surrounding the relationship between subjectivity, embodiment and humanness. Drawing on case studies on 20-21st C century world literature and screen media as well as a 19th C case study on the construction of conjoined twins in Victorian medicine and popular culture, the thesis argues that discourse on conjoined twins troubles normative notions of embodiment, subjectivity, individuality, and the human, as these have variously taken shape with reference to notions of racial and ethnic difference, nation, state, and globalization.