ABOUT
Examining Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) in his former home. | London, England.
Dr. Virlana Shchuka is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's Health and Humanities (HHIVE) Lab. She intersects and applies critical perspectives from her STEM and humanities research backgrounds to a directed holistic study of health and science narratives, particularly in the obstetrics and maternal care fields. Her primary project explores how writers understood and creatively represented birth timing challenges across medical and literary genres, both in the late eighteenth century and in the present day.
Three core tenets underpin her research philosophy:
i) undertaking an intellectually honest critical assessment of a subject under study;
ii) applying interdisciplinary perspectives to analyze that subject; and
iii) close-reading that subject's finer details, ones that, though often seemingly trivial at first glance, almost always, upon further investigation, unearth its complexities in new and exciting ways.
Prior to her current position, Dr. Shchuka carved out her academic journey so as to creatively bridge science and literature (H.BSc., Cell/Molecular Biology & English Literature, UToronto; M.A., Medical History and Humanities, UYork (UK); and Ph.D., Cell Biology, UToronto). Her passion lies in tracing patterns in childbirth and postnatal health representations across different forms of writing, particularly by women. Some of her research findings have been published in such peer-reviewed venues as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Genes & Development, Molecular Human Reproduction, Medical History, PLoS Biology, and Genome Research. Most recently, Dr. Shchuka held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, where her archival research examined discourses of domestic violence-induced labour in legal court cases and understudied women's fiction.
Dr. Shchuka is exceptionally proud to have had her research supported by all three main Canadian funding agencies: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC, Ph.D.); the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR, Ph.D., project grant co-supervisor) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC, PDF).​