DOGE UK
28 August 2026

“Queer Fish” researcher also received £120,080 from the taxpayer-funded AHRC

We should defund AHRC and the British Academy

Dr Donna McCormack (they/ them) is a Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, who received £196,016.22 from the taxpayer-funded British Academy for “their” project Doing Disability Futures (which links Palestine to “disability justice” among other things).

McCormack has “a strong interest in monsters” and is “a founding member of the Monster Network”, as well as “currently developing a project on Queer Fish”, making me wonder why the British Academy ever funded they/them’s work, as well as promoting McCormack on its socials:

Worse still is that McCormack has had taxpayer funding through another channel: the absolutely abysmal Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a subsidiary of the UK Research and Innovation – which spends “more than £9 billion of public money” every year:

Between 2018-20, McCormack was awarded £120,080 towards “their” research project Transplant Imaginaries: Haunted Times, Segregated Spaces and Embodied Ethics while working at the University of Surrey’s English department (hardly very useful for organ donation research).

The project analysed human organ transplantation “through the lens of contemporary novels and films”.

It explained that:

“Through the completion of a research monograph, the organisation of UK and international events, and the creation of multi-media outputs on transplantation, this project will analyse not only the impact biotechnologies have on how we understand the human body in relation to health and illness, but also how transplantation is tied to larger issues of national belonging, social justice and bodily ethics.”

In “their” academic profile, McCormack touches on the now-completed project, saying that “this intersection of visceral body and communities boundaries is at the heart of my research.”