Dorothy Butchard

I research and teach contemporary literature and digital cultures, with particular interest in creative responses to emerging technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

My research traces connections between contemporary literature, digital cultures, and lived experience. I explore how fiction, poetry and pop culture reflect on emerging digital platforms and their impact in communities and environments. My work focuses on interconnected themes of digital wellbeing, surveillance studies, environmental change, and the health effects of transforming technologies and infrastructures.  

I have published articles and chapters on contemporary contexts and imagined futures in genre fiction, new media, digital poetics and experimental writing. My first monograph, Digital Anxiety (currently in process), discusses the intersection of digital technologies and literary writing in the decades around the turn of the millennium, showing how creative works published during this time reconfigured the anxieties of earlier eras to grapple with the uncertainties of an emerging "digital age."

I am theme lead for Imagining Wellbeing in the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, co-director of UoB's Centre for Digital Cultures, and am working on Midlands Mosaics, a community project based around the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics in Redditch, UK.