Grace Halden

Overview

Biography

My background is in technology and posthumanism within literature and culture. I specialise in reproductive health, reproductive technologies, assisted reproduction (IUI and IVF), donor conception, and bioethics. I mainly work on 20th and 21st century literature and culture. My work is interdisciplinary and sits in the juncture between literary studies, creative writing, and medical humanities.

My current research project is called Cyborg Conception (for which I have held 3 separate grants). Cyborg Conception focuses on cultural responses to donor conception, solo motherhood by choice, and assisted reproduction. I have published creative writing and critical pieces on this topic.

My recent monograph Cyborg Conception: Cultural and Critical Responses to Solo Motherhood by Choice published by Palgrave, combines creative (lived experience) and critical writing on solo motherhood via gamete donation. This book considers the growing popularity of solo motherhood via gamete donation and how this is narrated in medicine, bioethics, fiction, and memoir

My last publication (October 2024) was a poem called Cavity about the empty womb following reproductive loss.

I am the co-director of the Centre for Medical and Health Humanities

Highlights

• Cyborg Conception: Cultural and Critical Responses to Solo Motherhood by Choice (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)

  
  

• 2023: Ronald Tress Prize 

  
  

• 2023: Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

• 2022-2023. ISSF Wellcome full funding for project: Independent Family Planning: Choosing Solo Motherhood through Gamete Donation. Summary: Through co-production with the donor conception community, I aim to produce an 8-page A5 booklet on solo motherhood by choice to be shared with fertility clinics specialising in donor conception. The objective of this booklet is to highlight to industry professionals the lived experiences of SMBC at the stages of family planning, choosing donor gametes, embarking on the conception journey, pregnancy, and birth. More information here: 

• Publication: 'Fatherlessness, sperm donors and ‘so what?’ parentage: arguing against the immorality of donor conception through ‘world literature’, Medical Humanities, 25 April 2022. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2021-012328 (part of the ISSF/Wellcome Cyborg Conception funded project)

  
  

• Publication of 'Independent Family Planning: Choosing Solo Motherhood through Gamete Donation. A guide for fertility healthcare professionals' (Wellcome, March 2023) peer reviewed by The Donor Conception Network, Dr Thanos Papathanasiou (Bourn Hall Clinic), and Dr Suzy Buckley (UCL).

• 2020-2021: ISSF Wellcome full funding for 12 months. Project: 'Cyborg Conception: technologized reproduction and posthuman families in literary and cultural imagination'. This project will intervene in the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities by understanding the cultural mediation of assisted reproduction through literature since 1978. Across three key genres, ‘Cyborg Conception’ analyses how literature forms part of the reimagined ‘entangled’ medical humanities (as articulated by Fitzgerald and Callard), interrogating and even ‘reanimating’ medical understandings of, and discourses around, assisted reproduction.

• 2021: Winner: Best Dissertation/Project Supervisor for Birkbeck Heroes (Birkbeck Students' Union)

Office hours

Mondays and Wednesdays

Qualifications

• PGCHE, 2017
• PhD, 2014
• QTS, 2009
• MA by Research, 2007
• BA Hons, 2005

Web profiles

• My website

Administrative responsibilities

• Director of BA English
• Member of the Open Access Research Group
• Convener for Theorising the Contemporary, Being Human, Methods
• Co-director Medical Humanities
• Co-director Centre for Medical and Health Humanities

Professional memberships

• Fellow of Royal Society for Public Health

• Professional member of the Donor Conception Nework

• Member of the SFRA

• HEA Fellow
  

• Member Open Access Sub-Committee at Birkbeck

• Member of the Atomic Photographer’s Guild

Honours and awards

• Ronald Tress Prize for Outstanding Research, Birkbeck, November 2023
• Fellow, Royal Society of Public Health, November 2023
• Translation Award/Grant, Wellcome/ISSF, November 2022
• Award: Community-Facing Events. For: Anonymity and Donor Conception in the Digital Age, Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN), November 2022
• Vice Chancellor Teaching Award , Birkbeck, November 2023
• 2021: Winner: Best Dissertation/Project Supervisor for Birkbeck Heroes), Birkbeck Students' Union, November 2021
• Research Grant, ISSF, November 2020
• High commendation, Public Engagement Awards, November 2018
• Birkbeck Excellence in Teaching Award (BETA), Birkbeck, November 2017

Research

Research interests

• Modern and contemporary literature
• Donor conception
• Bioethics
• Reproductive Health
• Assisted reproduction
• Memoir
• Creative Writing (non-fiction)
• Lived experience
• Technological Development
• Ruination
• American literature
• Global literature
• Posthumanism
• Transhumanism
• Artificial Intelligence
• bio-objects
• World War Two and Cold War
• Techological singularity
• Nuclear power / nuclear technology
• Human condition and human rights
• Hannah Arendt
• Primo Levi
• Marshall McLuhan
• Jean Baudrillard
• Martin Heidegger
• Jacques Derrida
• Cybernetics
• Apocalypse theory/prediction/narratives/religious/secular apocalypse,
• urban exploration

Research overview

I have particular interest and expertise in the subjects of representations of technology, the broad field of posthumanism, and technology assisted reproduction.

My current research interests concern human reproduction - chiefly, assisted reproduction (IUI/IVF) and donor conception, and how donor conception and solo parenthood by choice is discussed in contemporary culture and within bioethics. My Cyborg Conception project intervenes in literary and cultural studies and the medical humanities to question how storytelling addresses public understandings of diverse family formations. I have published widely on this topic including a book, industry materials (a booklet for fertility clinics), poems, flash-nonfiction, and peer reviewed academic articles. I am building up an IMPACT case study on my Cyborg Conception work which forges links between academic work and the donor conception community. So far, Cyborg Conception has been supported by three grants (ISSF/WELLCOME, and Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network). 

In the past, I completed research on the technology of war and genocide through World War II and the Cold War and have examined technological accidents - especially those that impact the environment and human life (such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima). Related specialisms include artificial intelligence, posthumanism, and life extension technologies and how they are discussed in popular culture. I am also deeply interested in ideas of the human condition and have researched and taught on the links between human condition, human rights, and technological influence (including but not limited to war technologies, social media, and bioengineering) and how they are discussed in both fiction and nonfiction.

Whilst I have a particular research specialism in American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, my work extends to consider the wider, global dimensions of the literature I study. Additionally, I have interest in the dynamic interaction and cultural exchange within the transnational space of online communities and how they offer a new examination of identity, nation, and critical geographies in the contemporary. I am further concerned with how selfhood and community are disrupted and displaced through conflict, technologies of war, and crises such as environmental disasters.

 

A list of research interests can be found here

I welcome PhD proposals on a wide variety of topics in English, Medical Humanities, and Creative Non-Fiction; a list can be found here.

Research clusters and groups

• Co-founder, STAG: Solo Parent Talk and Action Group
• Member, First Contact Research Group.

Research projects

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

7

I am currently welcoming proposals for PhD study. In the first instance please submit an informal letter of interest to me at g.halden@bbk.ac.uk. I will work with successful applicants on relevant funding applications including CHASE and Wellcome.

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I welcome proposals for English, Medical Humanities, and Creative Non-Fiction on the following topics (click here)

Current doctoral researchers

• CHARLOTTE NORTHALL

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2023 onwards

• MARTIN ROOT ROOT

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jan 2025 onwards

• OLIVIA ALLISON

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Sep 2024 onwards

• EMILY BERRY

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jan 2024 onwards

• JEMMA WALTON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jan 2022 onwards

• ORLA CUBITT

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2021 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• SIDDHARTH YADAV

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Jan 2019

  Title of thesis:

  Cyberpunk’s Not Dead: The Enduring Relevance of Technological and Spiritual Motifs in William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy

  Awarded:

  2023

Teaching

I mainly teach modern and contemporary literature, creative writing, creative/critical writing, critical theory, cultural history, and medical humanities. I teach at all levels - foundation year, BA, MA, PHD. I am also a qualified teacher (QTS) in secondary school and further education. I have won a couple of teaching awards.

As a qualified teacher of over ten years, I have a background in teaching English pre further education. I currently do outreach work in local schools offering workshops, seminars, lectures and CPD for staff. I am currently working with the English Association on forging connections between academia and schools. 

Qualifications: Certificate of Governance (2010), QTS (GTP) 2008, PGCHE (2017), Fellow HEA (2017).

Teaching modules

• The Arts: Questioning the Contemporary World (ARAR009S3)
• Dissertation (Literature and Culture 1800-present) (AREN145D7)
• Being Human: Posthumanism and the 21st Century (AREN231S7)
• The Novel: Writing the Modern World (ENHU009S5)
• Dissertation BA English (ENHU051S6)

Publications

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

• Assisted reproduction
• Donor conception
• Reproductive health
• solo parenthood by choice
• Posthumanism

Outreach

2022-2023. Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) funding for Award: Community-Facing Events. For: Anonymity and Donor Conception in the Digital Age.

EVENT: The Problem of Anonymity: A Film Showing of Offspring (2001) and a Discussion of Donor Anonymity in the Digital Age. 24 March 2023. Booking linl: https://bbk.ac.uk/events/remote_event_view?id=35850

2023 (montly)

STAG: Solo-Parent Talk and Action Group. Community Café.

Co-organised with Harriet Barratt, Natasza Lentner (admin for the Facebook groups Solo Parents by Choice UK), Ruth Talbot (founder of Single Parent Rights), and Dr Suzy Buckley from UCL.

This group provides a monthly space through which to discuss current research and developments in the field of donor conception for the donor conception community. Each event has two guest speakers. This is a free, public facing series.

2022. 'Effecting Change: Café for Solo Parents by Choice', Being Human Festival, November. Co-organiser alongside Dr Harriet Barratt. Tickets sold: 105.

Aimed at solo parents by choice (SPBC) through gamete donation, this community-based café offers attendees the opportunity to discuss current research and developments within the donor conception world and talk about how they are trying to effect positive change. Hosted by two solo mothers by choice, Grace Halden and Harriet Barratt, this is a safe space for reflection on the solo conception pathway. Joining us and talking about their work is admin for the Facebook groups Solo Parents by Choice UK Natasza Ann Lentner, founder of Single Parent Rights Ruth Talbot, and Associate Professor Suzy Buckley who is currently researching the experiences and support networks of solo mothers.

2022-2023. ISSF Wellcome full funding for project: Independent Family Planning: Choosing Solo Motherhood through Gamete Donation.

Summary: Through co-production with the donor conception community, I aim to produce an 8-page A5 booklet on solo motherhood by choice to be shared with fertility clinics specialising in donor conception. The objective of this booklet is to highlight to industry professionals the lived experiences of SMBC at the stages of family planning, choosing donor gametes, embarking on the conception journey, pregnancy, and birth. More information here: 

2021-

I am a professional member of the Donor Conception Network (DCN) and a volunteer for the DCN.

2017-

As a qualified teacher of over ten years, I have a background in teaching English pre further education. I currently do outreach work in local schools and FE providers. I am working closely with the English Association on school outreach and work with 4 schools providing resources and workshops. I also do workshops for staff - mainly on technology for teaching and learning. I work with the English and Media Association to provide career development sessions to teaching staff.

Qualifications: Certificate of Governance (2010), QTS (GTP) 2008, PGCHE (2017), Fellow HEA (2017).

Services