Faculty & Staff

Department of English Language and Literature
Professor
Phone: 902-496-8294
Office: MN331
Email: teresa.heffernan@smu.ca

Research Website

Personal Website

 

On Leave from SMU (Winter 2024) | University of Toronto Fellowship 

 

Overview

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.

 

Publication

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.