I had never heard of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, so I assumed it was a community college that had to scrape the bottom of the intersectional barrel to get any professors willing to teach there, even in these difficult times for professors looking for tenure.
Apparently not. It turns out to be a highly respected university in Scotland that focuses mainly on STEM research, and it is ranked as one of the best schools in the world in such things.
Who knew? What Cambridge is to the sociology of education, Strathclyde is to queer fish.
NEW: “Queer fish” researcher awarded £196k by the taxpayer-funded British Academy
— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) August 27, 2026
The Academy received just under £340 MILLION from taxpayers between 2021-25https://t.co/Ab8iciR9ve
If Strathclyde were just a community college somewhere, I wouldn't have given this story another thought; it's too easy to make fun of the odd research habits of obscure academics, but with the increasing number of stories coming out of prestigious universities that reveal that they have gone completely off the rails, stories like this matter.
And this is quite a story.
Dr Donna McCormack is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Strathclyde, the equivalent of an Assistant Professor at an American university. That is a plum job by academic standards because it is a permanent position, while a "lecturer" in the US generally means that you are one of the unlucky itinerant bards whose job is always at risk, and your career is generally characterized by traipsing from school to school, working for peanuts.
And she is, unquestionably, a nutter, and was likely hired because she is.
Here's her self-written bio:
I am the principal investigator on the British Academy (BA) funded project Doing Disability Futures. This project is funded as part of their strand entitled Knowledge Frontiers: International Interdisciplinary Research. This project uses arts-based and speculative methods to engage with global and local histories of colonial violence and ongoing injustices, as well as to tell stories of alternative futures that disrupt existing knowledge and power hierarchies. Working with the community organisation The Love Tank, we will produce a digital exhibition of disability stories from marginalised LGTBQ communities. We will also work with disabled artists from across various geographical sites to develop understandings of how speculative arts may disrupt and challenge disability injustice. We explore what disability futures are possible.
More broadly, my research is situated at the intersection of post- and anti-colonial studies, queer theory, and the medical humanities. In much of my work I formulate post- and anti-colonial, critical race and queercrip ways of analysing contemporary fiction in order to both critique systems of violence and to open up space for imagining what is possible. My focus is the body in the context of health and illness and trauma studies. I work across literatures from North Africa, the Caribbean and Canada. I am currently working on a monograph entitled Vital Death: Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Fiction.
I recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship on Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics, which focused on organ transplantation in contemporary fiction. My long-standing interest in organ transplantation in memoirs and fiction (novels and films) is both a concern with how narratives of transplantation may be reimagined, and an analysis of how new bodily imaginaries may offer alternative ways of thinking belonging, community and nation. Indeed, this intersection of visceral body and community boundaries is at the heart of my research.
My first book Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Bloomsbury 2014) examined the relation between familial and national violence and trauma in Moroccan, Canadian and Trinidadian literatures. Exploring how trauma may be passed on through the generations without language and through the use of the senses, this book offers a theory of sensory knowledge as a mode of bearing witness to unspeakable and unspoken familial and national traumas. It explores the endless collective work necessary to remember these often silenced histories.
I also have a strong interest in monsters and am a founding member of the Monster Network. I have written on Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of hopeful monsters, and I am interested in alternative evolution theories as forms of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-homo- and transphobic resistance. I am currently developing a project on Queer Fish.
I am currently the coordinator of the Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health.
No doubt you are as unaware as I am of what an AHRC Leadership Fellowship is, so let me enlighten you. The AHRC is a British organization that describes itself as doing cutting-edge research in the Arts and Humanities, and by its own description, it funds some pretty important things, like art preservation and exploring the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funds world-class, independent research in subjects from philosophy and the creative industries, to art conservation and product design. Our research addresses some of society’s biggest challenges, such as tackling modern slavery, exploring the ethical implications of artificial intelligence, and understanding what it is to be human.
What it really does, apparently, is fund musings on Queer fish, monsters, and Queer Postcolonial Narratives and Queer Crip (crip being short for crippled, or as we like to call it, disabled).
The AHRI gets about $150 million a year from the British taxpayer, and what they are sold is one thing, and what they are purchasing is quite another.
Strathclyde, for instance, tells us that it exists to promote these subjects:
To do this important work, McCormack was awarded over $250,000 in taxpayer money, and now British taxpayers have a deeper understanding of QueerCrip alternative futures. Of course, no wheelchairs were purchased nor ramps installed for the benefit of the disabled, but they got to imagine different, noncolonial futures.
In the grand scheme of things, what McCormack "studies" or likes to think about matters very little, but the fact that a world-class technical research university and the British government think that this is what academics should be doing matters quite a lot.
— Cynic (@Resident_Cynic) August 27, 2026
Jobs at prominent universities are scarce. Research funding is scarce. Decisions were made that put McCormack's interest in Queer fish higher on the priority scale than something actually useful.
Worst of all, this sort of "research" reproduces itself. PhD students follow in her footsteps.
Universities have gone down the path that David Burge identified for all leftist institutions.
Normal people naturally admire the purpose of academia as it is sold to us. Great universities have been key drivers of the success of Western Civilization, and without their contributions, our societies would be much poorer.
But they were infected by a virus that is eating them from within. While the entire body has not been eaten by the flesh-eating virus of leftism, it will be unless dramatic amputations take place. There is no cure save cutting off the limbs.
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