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 critical perspectives from her STEM and humanities research backgrounds to a holistic study of health narratives, particularly those related to childbirth complications. Her monograph-length project explores how writers understood and creatively represented birth timing challenges across medical and literary genres, both in the long 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 humanities fields (H.BSc., Cell/Molecular Biology and English Literature, UToronto; M.A., Medical History and Humanities, UYork (UK); and Ph.D., Cell Biology, UToronto). She seeks to uncover representational patterns in written expressions of childbirth and postnatal health experiences across different genres, particularly in narratives authored by women. 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 Libraries, where her archival work 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).

CURRENT AND UPCOMING

Delighted that Eighteenth-Century Fiction has accepted my work on the Romantic-period role of fathers in breastfeeding ... out now in the journal's 2022 summer issue!

Thrilled to have had the opportunity to give my talk on the "Gothic Motherhood" panel for Gothic Women! Check out the talks on previous panels here!

Check out our recently accepted paper, which uses rodent models to uncover previously unknown molecular players driving labour contractions! So proud of this collaboration between the Mitchell Lab and Shynlova Research Group!

Chawton House Library has recently uploaded their Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman audiobook! No novel in the eighteenth century shed light on domestic violence issues like this one. Honoured to be among the team's contributing readers!

Excited to get on board as contributor to Coram's Voices Through Time: The Story of Care project. Volunteers get to transcribe eighteenth-century historical records from and learn more about the Foundling Hospital's earliest days!