Teresa Heffernan is Professor of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS
She teaches courses in literary theory, critical posthumanism, feminist theory, and the novel. Her current area of research is on how the field of robotics and artificial intelligence is shaped by fiction.
Research Fellowship (2023-24): JHI Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow https://www.humanities.utoronto.ca/people/fellows/circle-fellows/teresa-heffernan
Research fellowship (2022-23) Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg
Visiting Professor (2019-20) AI Lab, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Research
Current SSHRC-funded research (2021-2023): “AI everywhere”: The Mythical and Religious Roots of Algorithmic Faith Where Science Meets Fiction: Social Robots and the Ethical Imagination
Her latest book is the edited collection Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (Palgrave, 2019). She is author of Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2008/2012), Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (University of Toronto Press, 2016), co-editor (with Daniel O’Quinn) of a critical edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (Broadview Press, 2012); book series editor, with Reina Lewis, of Cultures in Dialogue, co-editor (with Jill Didur) of a special issue of Cultural Studies: “Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire” and a special issue of Cultural Critique (with Jill Didur and Bart Simon): “Critical Posthumanism.” Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Arab Journal for the Humanities, Subject Matters, Canadian Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, English Studies in Africa, and Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media.
Series Editor (with Kathleen Richardson) for Palgrave MacMillan’s Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI
Teaching
A recent senior seminar: “Animal Life, Social Robots, and Cyborg Futures.”
