June 3
7 pm ET
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Note: this talk will introduce the concepts of the class Imagining a Transhuman Future: Designer Children and ALife in Octavia Butler and Kazuo Ishiguro: A Reading and Discussion Group taught by Wendy C. Nielsen, beginning June 11. More here.

Wendy Nielsen returns to Morbid Anatomy with an illustrated talk about transhumanism, the belief that technology will transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. The belief that science may make people superhuman has a long prehistory that coincides with the eugenics movement. Once repudiated as ableist and racist, eugenics has reemerged under the term liberal eugenics, which touts the possibility of longevity and curing human ailments. This talk draws in part from her recent book (Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890) and will touch on automatons, golems, and other precursors to robots but focuses on the present dangers of biohacking, designer children, private research sponsored by billionaires, and the ethics surrounding sentient, non-human life forms.

Wendy C. Nielsen, Ph.D. became a Professor of English at Montclair State University because she loves learning. Although Wendy teaches science fiction, comparative literature, and Medical Humanities in New Jersey, in her free time at home in Brooklyn, she is also a student herself (of Pilates, Buddhism, Tai Chi, cat care, and Narrative Medicine). Her scholarly research has focused on the recurrence of popular figures in Western cultural history. Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2012) explored female assassins, soldiers, and feminists associated with the French Revolution such as Charlotte Corday and Olympe de Gouges. Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (Routledge, 2022) examines Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men as part of the literary genealogy of transhumanism in American, British, French, and German literature. Wendy has also written on Boadicea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in leading academic journals. Her current research project addresses the impact of race on narratives about healing, how constructed communities function in women writers’ illness narratives, and why humans seek to blame people when they become ill.

Image: Vecteezy