Miranda Macfarlane

Miranda is a first-year Ph.D. student and Presidential Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Her research centers on the ways aesthetic and functional differences in embodiment interact with race, gender, and sexuality as a part of the larger tensions between self-definition and societal influence in eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature. She is particularly interested in how literature—including everything from novels to political polemics—interacts with the emerging fields of science and medicine in the long eighteenth century to develop a framework for creating bodily meaning whose influence is still evident today in how we speak, write, and think about our bodies.