Books
2019 Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Editor. Palgrave/MacMillan.
2016 Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity and the Spectres of Orientalism. University of Toronto Press.
2008/2012 Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press.
2012 Co-editor (with Daniel O’Quinn), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters. Broadview Press.
Series Editor
(with Kathleen Richardson) Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI
(with Reina Lewis) Cultures in Dialogue
Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters
2024 “Autonomous Weapons in Fiction and the Fiction of Autonomous Weapons.” The realities of autonomous weapons – imaginations between fact and fiction.” Bristol University Press, forthcoming.
2023 “Rethinking ‘Queer Kin Groups’: Cyborgs, Animals, and Machines.” Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice. Eds. Peggy Karpouzou and Nikoleta Zampaki. Peter Lang. 59-78.
2022 “The Imitation Game, the “Child Machine,” and the Fathers of AI.” AI & Society, online June 25: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01512-0
2020 “The Dangers of Mystifying Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, ”Toronto Journal of Theology 36.1: 93-95.
2020 “Fiction Writes Back: ‘Limitless Profit,’ Artificial Intelligence, and the Immortality Industry.” Researcher: European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 1.3: 27–46.
2019 “The Ethical Imagination: Artificial Intelligence versus the Humanities.” Video talk. C4eJournal: Perspectives on Ethics, University of Toronto.
2019 “Fiction Meets Science: Ex Machina, Artificial Intelligence and the Robotics Industry,” Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave/MacMillan.
2018 “A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Science, Fiction and Fairly Tales,” English Studies in Africa: 61.1
2016 “When the Movie is Better than the book: Fight Club, Consumption, and Vital Signs,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 57.2.
2015 “The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary Science, Fiction, and the Death Drive,” English Studies in Africa 58.2: 66-79.
2003 “Revisiting the Subaltern in the New Empire,” (co-written with Jill Didur). Cultural Studies 17.1: 1-1.
2003 “Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life.” Cultural Critique 53: 116-133
2001 “Apocalyptic Nations in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Twentieth Century Literature 46.4: 470‑91
2000 “Feminism against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33.2: 201-215
1998 “Beloved and the Problem of Mourning,” Studies in the Novel 30.4: 558-573.
Other publications
Heffernan, T. “The Idea of the Autonomous Robot Disguises All the Human Labour behind It.” Interview with Lizzie Wright, Imaging Post-Human Care project, December 16, 2021. Video.
Heffernan, T. “Robots,” Episode 49, Words to That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture. Podcast host Conor Reid in conversation with Dr. Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University) and Dr. Teresa Heffernan (Saint Mary’s University). Podcast.
Collector’s Booklet: Essay on the new release of The Quiet Earth (Blu-Ray):
See blogs
Recent Keynotes and Invited Talk
2023 “AI as the New Oil and other Myths,” Critical Finance Studies Conference. Rethymno,
Crete. Keynote.
2023 “The Mothers of AI? Alan Turing’s Response to Ada Lovelace,” ZeM Spring Lecture,
Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften, Potsdam, Germany.
2022 “Artificial Intelligence and the (Post-)Apocalyptic Imaginary,” CAPAS, Heidelberg, Germany.
2022 “Misogynistic Algorithms.”Anthropology, AI, and the Future of the
Human, The Royal Anthropological Institute. Invited Panelist.
2022 “More Than Human. Posthumanism, Human-Technological Relations, and Bioethics.”
Brock University. Invited Panelist.
2020 “AI, the Immortality Industry and the Ethics of Death.” Video. C4eJournal: Perspectives
on Ethics, University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYZY0Py0YXo
2018 “Fiction Writes Back: The 2045 Initiative, Zero K, and the Immortality Industry,” Leeds University, May 2018.
“AI and Robotics: Where Fiction and the Industry Intersect.” Paper presented at Responsible Robots: Shaping Our Future With Robotics. Lorentz Center, Leiden, the Netherlands. February 19 – 23, 2018. Invited.
“Where Science Meets Fiction: Concerns About the Artificial Intelligence Industry.” Respondent to public lecture by Stan Matwin “Artificial Intelligence: Successes and Challenges.” Automatons: From Ovid to AI. King’s College Public Lecture Series 2018. University of King’s College, Halifax, NS. February 14, 2018. Invited. Video.
“Imagining Automatons: Images of Robots in Fiction and Science.” Public lecture presented at Automatons: From Ovid to AI. King’s College Public Lecture Series 2018. January 17, 2018. Video.
Panel participant in “Public Debate: AI/Robots and Our Future.” Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. October 19, 2017. Invited. Video.
“Coding Life: Frankenstein, Monsters and Robots.” Bristol Festival of Ideas, April 2016. Invited.
“Robot Capital, Animals, and Rights Discourse.” Digital Cultures, University of the West of England, April 2016. Invited.
“From Petman to Pepper: Robot Emotions and the Deadly Logic of Cuteness.” The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness Conference. University of Amsterdam, October, 2015. Keynote.
“Science, Fiction, and the Death Drive.” End Times Colloquium, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, July 2014. Keynote.
“Careless Rights: Humans, Animals, Robots.” Fictions of Threat Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, July 2014. Keynote.