Elizabeth A. Wilson

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Elizabeth A. Wilson, a professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University, works in feminist science studies using psychoanalytic theory, affect theory, feminist and queer theory, and contemporary neuroscientific data. She is the author of Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke University Press, 2004) and Affect and Artificial Intelligence (University of Washington Press, 2010).

While in residence at the Radcliffe Institute, Wilson will be completing a research project, “Gut Feminism,” that argues for the use of biological data in feminist theory. Focused on depression, this project shows how contemporary depressive states are characterized by an entanglement of affects, sociality, and biochemistry. Drawing on feminist theory, clinical psychodynamic research, and biological data about depression (especially in relation to the gut), this project investigates the kinds of embodiment that are being produced by endemic melancholia. The neurobiology of the viscera and the pharmacology of SSRI antidepressants will be central to this investigation.

Wilson has a PhD in psychology from the University of Sydney. She has been the recipient of an Australian Research Council fellowship (2004–2008) and was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2003–2004).