Rachel Genn

Rachel Genn works across Manchester Writing School/School of Digital Arts and recently taught the Experimental Literature MA in English at University of Sheffield. She was a research Neuroscientist and Post-Doctoral Royal Society Research Fellow, at the University of British Columbia, Kings College Medical School and the Institute of Psychiatry, London. She worked on the neurochemical basis of wanting and liking; incentive relativity, (why and how experience influences what we like) and on how attentional mechanisms affect goal-oriented behaviour.

 

Rachel has written two novels:  THE CURE (2011) and WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON (2020) and is working on a third. As Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016) at the University of Sheffield, she created THE NATIONAL FACILITY FOR THE REGULATION OF REGRET, spanning installation art, VR and film (ASFF 2016, SXSW 2017). Her recent non-fiction work on fighting and fashions evolved into BATTLEDRESS, an immersive installation made with Debbie Ballin and Human Studio, being submitted to Film and Alternate Reality Festivals worldwide in 2023.

 

She has written non-fiction and criticism for Granta, Aeon/Psyche, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wellcome Trust and The New Statesman, MIT Press's Art and Science journal, Leonardo, as well as numerous literary and scientific journals, and is currently working on a trio of non-fiction books around the subjects of regret and immersion, metaphor and creativity. Rachel discusses creative reverie here on Radio 3's The Verb and her formative relationship with regret is aired in CATCHING LIGHT which was a Radio 4 Four Thought essay in December, 2022.