Elspeth Jajdelska

Elspeth Jajdelska is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Strathclyde. Her research bridges literary studies, cognitive science, and historical analysis, focusing on the cognition of fiction and the evolution of reading practices between 1650 and 1750.

• Education: Undergraduate at Glasgow University, PhD at Leeds, MSc in Cognitive Science (2016) with distinction.

Her work explores how narrative structures engage the mind, with recent studies on neural networks and emotional responses in fiction. She contributes to undergraduate teaching, including courses on oral narratives, literature and wellbeing, and Soviet literature.

She serves on the Higher Education Committee of the English Association and collaborates internationally, as seen in her 2020–present project A Different World: How the Brain Responds to Fiction. Her 2019 article in Frontiers in Psychology analyzes narrative processing across media.