Dr Sara-Patricia Wasson

I work with story, structure, suffering, and hope. Researching across critical medical humanities and environmental humanities, I study how human and other-than-human worlds meet in illness and recovery, in plant histories and cultural narratives, and in the ways language and silence make space for complex experience.

Books

Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film and Medicine (Manchester University Press). Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize, and winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize of the International Gothic Association.

Gothic Science Fiction, 1980-2020 (Liverpool University Press, co-edited with Emily Alder).

Urban Gothic of the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan). Shortlisted for the international ESSE Award for Cultural Studies in English, Category A, and winner of the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize of the International Gothic Association.

Translating Pain: Flash Anthology

Translating Pain: Moments and Fragments — an international online anthology of flash writing on pain experience. Funded by the AHRC as part of the Translating Chronic Pain project, for which I was Principal Investigator. Submissions welcome!

Selected Articles and Chapters

Sara Wasson, ‘Pain’s Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honouring its Telling’ , Literature and Medicine, 41, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 283–302.
Sara Wasson, ‘Flash Illness Writing, Chronic Pain, and Alternatives to “Resilience”’, Literature and Medicine, 41, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 430–460.
Sara Wasson, ‘Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain’ , BMJ Medical Humanities, 44.2 (June 2018): 106–112.
Sara Wasson, ‘Waiting, Strange: Transplant Recipient Experience, Medical Time, and Queer Temporalities’ , BMJ Medical Humanities, 47.4 (December 2021): 447–455.

Environmental Humanities and Critical Plant Studies

Sara Wasson, 'Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the "Anthropocene"' , in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, ed. by Justin D. Edwards, Johan Höglund and Rune Graulund (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).

I have also published creative work, including this flash science fiction which was short-listed for a FracturedLit prize: Sara Wasson, 'Relict Communities'.

I am currently working on a creative project with the ancient North Wales Celtic Rainforests of Coed Felenrhyd and Ceunant Llennyrch.

Book cover of Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene

This site is currently under adventurous construction. Please check back soon for a full digital sanctuary of my work.