Medical Humanities Research Centre (MHRC)

Katherine is an MRes Film & TV Studies researcher at the University of Glasgow, focusing on rural populations, family structures, childness, and gender and how they intersect in eugenic narratives in popular horror cinema in her thesis, “Tales from the Cripped: Representations of Disability in American horror Cinema.” Her thesis explores the eugenic fervour prevalent in 1930s America with the Universal monster films and the development of western psychology and psychiatry in this context, and discusses issues of 'childness' and learning disability, contagion, incest/remote communities, and physical difference as signifiers of monstrosity. Katherine is soon pursuing PhD research in Film Studies on narratives of disability, ageing, and illness in Latin American horror, as well as the figures of the disabled child and guiding hag as national and personal threat in the genre. Much of her research centers on the role of contagion vs eugenics narratives, and their intersections, as central to our popular conception of monstrosity.

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