Author Investigation: Debra Benita Shaw

Debra Benita Shaw is a senior lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. According to her page on the UEL website, her areas of research interest include "cultural theory and its application to everyday life with a particular emphasis on science and technology, the city and popular culture," as well as "science fiction criticism and teaching."

In Technoculture: The Key Concepts, the book from which this week's reading is drawn, Shaw examines how scientific ideas and technological developments affect how we view our everyday lives. She also wrote Women, Science and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance (2000), which looked at science fiction written by women in the 20th century. And, according to her UEL Web page, she is currently at work on her third book, "which will explore the usefulness of theories of posthumanism to understanding the cultural life of contemporary cities and the possibilities for social justice now and in the future." Shaw was the editor of a special 2009 edition of Science as Culture called "Technology, Death & The Cultural Imagination."

You can watch an audio slideshow of Shaw giving a lecture called Posthuman Urbanism on "the mythologies of urban space and the way in which these construct metropolitan subjectivities" here.

Shaw earned her PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1995.