Samantha Murray

I received my doctorate in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2007 from Macquarie University. My thesis drew on poststructuralism and phenomenology to examine the lived experience of women identifying and/or positioned as fat in Western cultures via a discursive analysis of clinical, popular and political narratives of obesity. In 2008, I was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Macquarie University, and later took up a lecturing post in Cultural Studies.

Since 2002, I have worked in teaching and research with a critical health studies focus at a number of Australian institutions, including Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, and the University of New South Wales. Following a career break in 2012, I returned to academia in 2015, and in January 2018, I joined the Centre for Research in Public Health and Community Care (CRIPACC) at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. I am undertaking research within the remit of food, obesity discourse, and young people, and I have specific research interests in weight loss surgeries, public health pedagogies, and the intersections between eating practices, gendered embodiment, and youth.

I am the author of The ‘Fat’ Female Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and co-editor of both Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (Ashgate, 2009), and Queering Fat Embodiment (Ashgate, 2014). I have published articles and book chapters on obesity, embodiment, and the discursive constructions of normalcy and pathology, and I am currently writing a critical analysis of weight loss surgeries (monograph to be published with Routledge in 2020).