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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Nicola Simonetti

Biography

I joined Durham as a Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities in September 2024. I specialise in Neurodiversity Studies, Comparative Literature, and Contemporary Studies, with research interests that span three main areas: neurodiversity and dis/ability deployments in literary and science fiction; the interplay between contemporary epistemologies and crip time; OCD.   

I completed my MA (Hons) and MLitt at the University of St Andrews, where I finished by PhD in Comparative Literature in March 2024. Before joining Durham, I worked as a Research Fellow in Literature / Digital Humanities on a STAIRS-funded interdisciplinary project researching human reproduction in space. 

Current Research

I’m currently working on my first monograph, provisionally titled Neurodiversity and the Contemporary. This book, building on my doctoral research, offers a provocative analysis of the intersections between neurodiversity and the diverse field of Contemporary Studies. By addressing the question ‘what is the contemporary?’, it delves into neuronovels to explore some of the imaginative spaces where today’s temporalities unfold and neurodivergent bodyminds are (re)created. So, it aims to illuminate the entanglements between categories of crip time and the contemporary, the exclusionary mechanisms that govern neurodivergence construction and models of the contemporary, and advocates for a new vocabulary signalling the role of contemporary neuroinclusive perspectives into twenty-first-century epistemological processes.

In parallel, I am developing an interdisciplinary and cross-sector project exploring the dynamics between culture and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The project will employ a mixed-methods approach, integrating literary analysis of fictional and nonfictional texts with research into other narrative forms. This will allow for a comprehensive exploration of OCD in relation to the cultural products distinctive of "the contemporary condition", as well as provide new insights into OCD's contextualisation within larger discourses of ablenationalism, the postcontemporary time complex, and the development of new forms of storytelling about OCD in collaboration with experience-led users.

Research interests

  • Neurodiversity
  • Critical Disability Studies
  • Contemporary Epistemologies
  • OCD
  • 21st-century Literature