Research interests:
History and theories of sexuality; history and politics of sexual 'perversion'; modern critical theory (particularly psychoanalysis, queer theory and ethics); nineteenth-century French writing and culture; Decadence and the fin de siècle; cinema and media studies, esp. the intersection of film and philosophy; death studies.
Publications:
AUTHORED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa, Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan (co-authored), Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts (in preparation).
Downing, Lisa, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality and the Making of the Modern Killer (forthcoming, 2012/13).
Downing, Lisa and Libby Saxton (co-authored), Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
Downing, Lisa, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Downing, Lisa, Patrice Leconte, French Film Directors Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
Downing, Lisa, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth- Century French Literature Legenda (Oxford: EHRC, 2003).
EDITED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Downing, Lisa and Sue Harris (eds), From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007; reissued in paperback: 2011).
Nobus, Dany and Lisa Downing (eds), Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Karnac Books, 2006).
EDITED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Harkness, Nigel, Lisa Downing, Sonya Stephens and Tim Unwin (eds), Birth and Death : Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, 'Faux titres' (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
Capitanio, Sarah, Lisa Downing, Paul Rowe and Nick White (eds), Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).
GUEST EDITED SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS
Downing, Lisa (ed.), Special Section of a Special Issue of Psychology and Sexuality on Sex Blogging, 3:1, 2012.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Special Issue of Sexualities, on 'European Culture/ European Queer', 15:1, 2012.
Cryle, Peter and Lisa Downing (eds), Special Issue of Psychology and Sexuality on 'Nature and Normality in the History of Sexuality', 1:3, 2010.
Cryle, Peter and Lisa Downing (eds), Special Issue of Journal of the History of Sexuality, on 'Feminine Sexual Pathologies', 18:1, 2009.
ARTICLES IN REFEREED JOURNALS
Downing, Lisa, 'Gendered Constructions of the Nightmare in French Nineteenth-Century Medical Writing and Fantastic Fiction', French Studies (in press, 2012).
Downing, Lisa,
'Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, Queer: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Contentions in France', Paragraph' Special Issue on 'Queer Theory in France', ed. Oliver Davis and Hector Kolias (in press, 2012).
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, 'Bataille, Trangression and Queer Theory', Nottingham French Studies, Special Issue on 'The avant-garde', ed. Stephen Forcer and Emma Wagstaff (in press, 2012).
Downing, Lisa, 'Notes on a Proto-Queer Rachilde: Decadence, Deviance and (Reverse) Discourse', Sexualities, Special Issue on 'European Culture/ European Queer', ed. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, 15:1, (in press, 2012).
Downing, Lisa, 'Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary: Sex-Blogging, Community-Building and Feminism(s)', Psychology and Sexuality , Introduction to a Special Section of a Special Issue on 'Sex Blogging', 3:1, 2012, 5-11.
Downing, Lisa, ‘On the Fantasy of Childlessness as Death in Psychoanalysis and in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and von Trier’s Antichrist’, Lambda Nordica, 2:3, 2011, 49-68.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, 'Viewing Critical Psychology through the Lens of Queer', Psychology and Sexuality, Special Issue on 'Queer(y)ing Psychology', ed. Peter Hegarty, 2:1, 2011, 4-15.
Gillett, Robert and Lisa Downing, 'The Translation of Deployment/ The Deployment of Translation: The dispositif in Foucault, his Exegetes and his Translators', In Other Words: The Journal for Literary Translators, Special Issue on 'Translating Queers/ Queering Translation', ed. B. J. Epstein, No. 36, 2010, 40-53.
Downing, Lisa,
'John Money's "Normophilia": Diagnosing Sexual Normality in Late-Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Sexology', Psychology and Sexuality, Special Issue on 'The Natural and The Normal in the HIstory of Sexuality' ed. Peter Cryle and Lisa Downing, 1:3, 2010, 275-87.
Downing, Lisa, 'Murder in the Feminine: Madame Lafarge and the Sexualization of the Nineteenth-Century Criminal Woman' Journal of the History of Sexuality, Special Issue on 'Feminine Sexual Pathologies' ed. Peter Cryle and Lisa Downing, 18:1, 2010, 121-37.
Downing, Lisa, 'Reviewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Fim', Film-Philosophy, Special Issue on 'The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’, ed. Sarah Cooper, 11:2, 2007, 49-65.
Downing, Lisa, 'Baise-moi or the Ethics of the Desiring Gaze', Nottingham French Studies, special issue on 'Focalizing the Body: Recent Women's Writing and Filmmaking in France' ed. Gill Rye and Carrie Tarr, 45:3, 2006, 52-65.
Downing, Lisa, 'The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud', Dix-Neuf, fully refereed online journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, no. 5, 2005, 28-46.
Downing, Lisa and Dany Nobus (co-authored ), 'The Iconography of Asphyxiophilia: From Fantasmatic Fetish to Forensic Fact', Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 27:3, 2004, 1-15.
Downing, Lisa, 'French Cinema's New Sexual Revolution: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre', French Cultural Studies , Special Issue on 'New Directions in French Cinema' ed. Sue Harris, 15:3, 2004, 265-80.
Downing, Lisa, 'The Measure of Sexual Dysfunction: A Plea for Theoretical Limitlessness', Transformations: Region, Culture, Society, special issue on 'Regions of Sexuality', ed. Iain Morland and Wendy O'Brien no. 8, 2004.
Downing, Lisa, 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction', French Studies, 58:2, 2004, 189-204.
Downing, Lisa, 'On the Limits of Sexual Ethics: The Phenomenology of Autassassinophilia', Sexuality and Culture, 8:1, 2004, 3-17.
Downing, Lisa, 'Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in Female-Authored Textual Production', French Cultural Studies, 14:2, 2003, 157-168.
Downing, Lisa, 'Between Men and Women; Beyond Heterosexuality: Limits and Possibilities of the Erotic in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed and Patrice Leconte's La Fille sur le pont', Romance Studies, University of Swansea, 20:1, 2002, 29-40.
Downing, Lisa, 'Feminist Fictions of the Flesh (?): Alina Reyes's Le Boucher and Rachilde's La Marquise de Sade', Journal of Romance Studies, 2:1, 2002, 51-64.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Downing, Lisa, 'Snuff and Nonsense: The Discursive Life of an Imaginary Archive', in Porn Archives, ed. Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky & David Squires (Durham and London: Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2012/13).
Downing, Lisa, 'Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity' in Clinical Encounters: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (London and New York: forthcoming, 2012/13).
Downing, Lisa, '"Straight" Necrophilia as a "Queer" Perversion' in Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed', in Tainted Love; Screening Sexual Perversities, ed. Darren Kerr and Donna Perbedy (London: I B Tauris, forthcoming, 2012).
Downing, Lisa ‘Sexual Perversion as Textual Resistance in the Writing of Rachilde and Monique Wittig’ in Modernist Eroticisms, ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, in press, 2012).
Downing, Lisa,
'Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology' in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 201-220.
Downing, Lisa, 'Sexual Variations' in Sexuality in the Age of Empire (1820-1920), ed. Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Sexuality, general ed. Julie Peakman (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 63-81.
Downing, Lisa, 'Michel Foucault' in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Robert Eaglestone (Oxford: Wiley-Black, 19-33.well, 2010).
Downing, Lisa, 'Criminality, Sexuality, Abnormality: Nineteenth-Century Scientific Constructions' in New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film, ed. Louise Hardwick, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 19-33.
Downing, Lisa,‘Beyond Safety: Erotic Asphyxiation and the Limits of S/M Discourse' in Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism ed. Darren Langridge and Meg Barker (Palgrave, 2007), 119-32.
Downing, Lisa,'Polanski's Deneuve: Frigidity and Feminism' in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, edited Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 14-28.
Downing, Lisa, 'Perversion, Historicity, Ethics ' in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, edited Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing ( London: Karnac Books, 2006), 149-163.
Downing, Lisa,'Thanatos' , 'Necrophilia', 'Erotic Asphyxiation', 'Charles Baudelaire', 'Pétrus Borel', in Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature , ed. Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phillips (London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006).
Downing, Lisa, 'Sexuality' in Companion to Modern French Thought, ed. Christopher John Murray (London and New York: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 582-7.
Downing, Lisa, ''Ecstasies and Agonies: The 'Oceanic Feeling', God and Sexuality in Baudelaire and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam' in (Un)Faithful Texts: Religion in French and Francophone Literature from the 1780s to the 1980s , ed. Paul Cooke and Jane Lee (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2000) 53-66.
REVIEW ARTICLES (OVER 1500 WORDS)
Downing, Lisa, 'Object-Become-Subject: When Femmes Look Back', Review of Del LaGrace Volcano and Ulrika Dahl, Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities (London: Serpent's Tale, 2008) in SQS - Journal of Queer Studies in Finland, 5:1, 2011, 63-65.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Rothenberg, Foster and Zizek (eds), Perversion and the Social Relation (Duke University Press, 2003) in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 36:1, 2007,127-28.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago University Press, 2000) in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 34: 2, 2005, 255-57.
Current and Future Research Projects:
In the field of the history of sexuality, I am currently working on a project on the history of the 'perversion'/ 'paraphilia' diagnosis from the European nineteenth century to the present day Anglo-American context, with a particular focus on the work of late US sexologist, John Money. This research is funded by a grant from the Wellcome Trust which allowed me to undertake archival research at the Kinsey Institute, USA, in March-April 2011, and has been supported by the award of a 2009 Philip Leverhulme prize. One major output of the project will be a co-authored book with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, with a working title of 'Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts'.
My broad project also involves work on the new 'Paraphilia' diagnosis currently being devised by the Subgroup of the American Psychiatric Association working on the new DSM 5. I offer a critical humanities viewpoint on the proposals being formulated.
In the field of cultural and film studies, I am in the early stages of work on the intersection of representations of the figure of 'The Child' and the thematics of life and death; innocence and evil. This idea was inspired by work undertaken for my most recent book: a study of the figure of the murderer across a range of textual and visual media (The Subject of Murder, forthcoming), which includes a chapter on children and young people who kill. I was struck by the epistemological problem posed by children who commit violence for a culture in which class 'child' and class 'murderer' - two fictive and politically charged constructions - are seen as ontologically mutually exclusive. I have additionally recently published an article in the leading Scandinavian journal of Queer Studies, Lambda Nordica, on the cultural fantasy of childlessness as death, taking Lars von Trier’s Antichrist as its central case study and reading it alongside the logic of classical psychoanalytic theory and Lee Edelman’s anti-reproductive queer theory. In the medium term, I envisage a monograph project emerging from this research, centring on children as agents, victims, and ciphers of death in comparative European and North American cinematic and other cultural contexts.
Thirdly, in the field of sexuality and gender studies, I am planning a major interdisciplinary project, to be co-directed with Prof. Tim Dean (SUNY Buffalo), on the historical and contemporary meanings of 'sexual consent' and 'sexual agency' in comparative European and North American contexts and discourses (literary and cultural, philosophical, legal, medical), using the tools of feminist and queer theories. One of my interests lies in teasing out unsung and counter-intuitive resonances between the way agency is modeled in deconstructive queer theory and radical feminist theory.
Research Funding:
2010: Wellcome Trust Research Expenses Grant (‘A Critical Study of John Money’s Contribution to the Sexological Concept of Paraphilia’)
2009: Philip Leverhulme Prize
2008: British Academy Overseas Conference Grant (‘Nature and Normality in The History of Sexuality’, Prato, Italy)
2007: As PI and named host: British Academy Visiting Fellowship, to receive Dr Elizabeth Stephens, University of Queensland, Australia, to work in CISSGE on a project entitled ‘The Body in the Museum: Public Exhibitions of Human Bodies in British Anatomy Museums’
2005: AHRC Research Leave Scheme
2003: Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France award for the Second Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes
2002: British Academy Conference Grant for the First Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes
2002: British Academy Small Research Grant (‘Patrice Leconte’)
1996: British Academy Studentship for PhD study (three-year full award)
1995: British Academy Studentship for MA study (one-year full award)
Other Research Activities:
Research Affiliations
I am an Affiliate of the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) at the University of Queensland, Australia.
I am a Research Associate of the Centre for Somatechnics, Macquarie University, Australia.
Critical Sexology
I co-organise (with Dr Meg Barker, Open University and Dr Robert Gillett, QMUL) this interdisciplinary seminar series for psychologists, psychoanalysts, medical doctors, literary and cultural studies scholars, philosophers, artists, lawyers and historians with a critical interest in the construction and management of gender and sexuality in the medical, discursive and cultural spheres. I also co-moderate the Critical Sexology mailing list and manage the website.
(For details of our activities, see: http://www.criticalsexology.org.uk )
Queer(y)ing Psychology
I am a participlant in this project run by a group of psychologists, which attempts to ascertain the potential uses of radical queer theory for reconceptualising sexuality in the psychological disciplines.
http://www.queeryingpsychology.org.uk/
Society of Dix-Neuviémistes
I was a founding member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, a UK-based organisation for international researchers in nineteenth-century French Studies. I held the position of Conference Officer from 2001-2006. Details of the Society can be found at: http://www.sdn.ac.uk
AHRC Peer Review College
I am a
member of the AHRC's Peer Review College for the following subjects: Gender and Sexuality; Film History, Theory, Criticism; Media and Communication; French Studies.
Founder and Director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE) at the University of Exeter.
Psychology and Sexuality
I sit on the advisory board of this new Taylor and Francis psychology journal as a non-psychologist offering a theoretical arts and humanities perspective on sexuality studies.
Fabula–Littérature Histoire Théorie ( Fabula-LHT )
I am part of the the Advisory Board of this online French journal of literary and cultural studies. http://www.fabula.org/lht/
Supervision of PhD Students:
PhD projects currently and formerly supervised include:
James Bernthal (co-supervision with Dr Vike Plock: PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2011-2014, University of Exeter) for a thesis entitled: ‘Queering the Outcast in Agatha Christie, 1920-1950’.
Elena Lipsos (co-supervision with Dr Corrina Wagner: PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2010-2013, University of Exeter) for a thesis entitled: ‘A Genealogy of “Pin-Up”: Charting Excessive Femininity through a Pin-Up Aesthetic’.
Caroline Walters (PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies 2008-2011, University of Exeter) for a thesis entitled: ‘Discourses of Female Heterosexual Masochism and Submission from 1880 to the Present Day’. (Thesis is on target to be submitted in January 2012.)
Lara Cox (co-supervision with Dr David Houston Jones: MRes 2007-08; PhD in French 2008-2011, University of Exeter) for a thesis entitled: ‘Re-envisioning the Theatre of Absurd: The Lacanian Spectator and the Work of Fernando Arrabal, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco’. (Viva passed July 2011.)
Gerri Kimber (from 2003-2006 at QMUL; from 2006-2007 at the University of Exeter; PhD in French) for a thesis entitled ‘Katherine Mansfield: The View from France’. (Thesis now published as two books.)
Lucy Bolton (From 2004-2006 at QMUL [subsequently supervised by Dr Sarah Cooper (KCL) and Prof. Peter Evans]; PhD in Film) for a thesis entitled ‘“But What if the Object Started to Speak?” Examining Female Consciousness On-screen Using the Thought of Luce Irigaray’. (Thesis now published as a book.)
Invited Lectures, Seminar Papers, Plenary Papers and Regular Conference Papers (a representative selection, 2000-2011):
‘Tracing A Proto-Queer Feminist Genealogy: Rachilde, Wittig, Butler’, invited lecture given in the ‘Literature and Sexuality’ Lecture Series, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Kent, November 2011.
‘A Genealogy of the Perversions in Sexual Science’, invited public lecture given in the Humanities and Science Lecture Series, Humanities Institute, SUNY Buffalo, USA, April 2011.
‘From Acts to Identity: Gender Norms, Trans* and Misogyny in the History of the “Paraphilia” Diagnosis’, invited paper given at a conference on ‘“Post-Posttranssexual”: Transgender Studies and Feminism’, University of Indiana, USA, April 2011.
‘Perversion, Fixity and Fluidity in the History of the Psy Disciplines and in Queer Theory’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Transgression and Discipline’, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy, September 2010.
‘“Monochrome Man”: Representing Dennis Nilsen’ invited research paper presented at the IGRS Visual Cultures Seminar series on ‘The Art of Murder’, University of London, May 2010.
‘John Money's Contribution to the Sexological Theory of Paraphilia’, paper presented at the international ESSHC (European Social Science History Conference), Ghent, Belgium, April 2010.
‘On the Fantasy of Childlessness as Death in Psychoanalysis and in Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973) and Antichrist (von Trier, 2009)’, invited paper presented at a conference on 'The Moving Image: Reconfiguring Spaces of Loss and Mourning in the 21st Century', at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, February 2010.
‘Doing Interdisciplinary Research on the Cusp of French Studies and Sexuality Studies’, invited paper presented at the Modern French Research Seminar, University of Oxford, October 2009.
‘Doing Interdisciplinary Research on the Cusp of French Studies and Sexuality Studies’, invited paper presented at the Modern French Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, May 2009.
‘Mal du siècle/ maladie du siècle: Gendered Constructions of Sexual Sickness in/of the Nineteenth Century', keynote lecture given at the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes Postgraduate Conference, IGRS, London, September 2008.
‘“Normophilia”: Diagnosing Sexual Normality in Late-Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Sexology’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Nature and Normality in the History of Sexuality’, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy, September 2008.
‘Between Psychoanalysis and the Screen: Some Thoughts on Lacan, Ethics and Film’, invited paper presented at The Queen Mary Malcolm Bowie Conference: Across the Arts, Queen Mary, University of London, December 2007.
‘Criminality, Sexuality, Abnormality: Nineteenth-Century Scientific Constructions’, keynote lecture given at the Oxford University French Graduate Conference on ‘Crime’, University of Oxford, September 2007.
‘Between Radical Ethics and Horror: Visualizing Sexual Otherness in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day’, invited paper presented at a Conference on ‘Alienation and Alterity’, University of Exeter, September 2007.
‘Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology’, keynote lecture given at ‘Sexual Histories: Bodies and Desires Uncovered’, an international conference organized by the Department of History, University of Exeter, July 2007.
‘Michel Foucault and the Queer Self/Other’, invited paper presented in a panel on ‘Queer Theory’ at Society of French Studies Conference, Birmingham, July 2007.
‘Acts without a Future: Erasing the Subject of Edelman’, paper presented at ‘No Future Together: A Symposium on the Work of Lee Edelman’, Kings College London, June 2007.
‘Frigidity and Feminism: Catherine Deneuve in Polanski’s Repulsion’, invited visiting lecture given at the Humanities Research Seminar, London Metropolitan University, April, 2007.
‘Madame Lafarge and the Problem of Guilt in the Feminine’, keynote lecture given at the Cambridge French Graduate Conference on ‘Shame and Guilt’, April 2007.
‘Institutionalizing Unreason: The Nightmare, Alienism, and Masculinity’, paper presented at ‘Institutions and Power’, the Fifth Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, University of Cambridge, March-April 2007.
‘Queering Perversion: Erotic Asphyxiation and the Bodily Politics of the Death Drive’, invited paper presented at 'Subverting What? Perversion, Transgression and Normalization in Queer Studies'. (A session on the work of Tim Dean and Lisa Downing, part of the ‘The(e)ories’ Seminar series), University College Dublin, March 2007.
‘Beyond Safety: Erotic Asphyxiation and the Limits of S/M Discourse’, paper presented at ‘Sexual Subcultures and Discourses of Health and Harm’, Critical Sexology Seminar, Queen Mary, University of London, February 2007.
‘Doing and Undoing Gender at the French fin de siècle: Sexology, Decadent Authorship and Rachilde’, keynote lecture given at: ‘The European fin de siècle: Gender, Nation, Race’, two-day conference at IGRS, University of London, December 2006.
‘Murder in the Feminine’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Femininity and the Construction of Sexual Pathologies’, Monash Centre, Prato, Italy, September-October 2006.
‘Re-viewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film’, invited paper presented at ‘Levinas and Cinema’, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, May 2006.
‘Perversion - Which Version?: History, Ideology, Ethics’, invited paper presented at ‘Reviewing Perversion: Clinical Enquiry 5’, Confer, Royal College of GPs, London, February 2006.
‘Murderous Female Sexuality in the Contemporary Queer Road Movie’, paper presented at ‘Designs for Living: Space and Place in the Cinema’, a conference organized by the Centre for Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, June, 2005.
‘The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud’, plenary lecture given at ‘Birth and Death’, the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes Third Annual Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, April 2005.
‘Nocturnal Visions: Imagining the Nightmare in French Nineteenth-Century Literary, Scientific and Visual Cultures’, invited lecture given at the ‘Ideas in Progress’ forum, Department of Art, Philosophy and Visual Culture, Middlesex University, March 2005.
‘Narrating the Nightmare: Literary and Scientific Accounts of Night Terrors in Nineteenth-Century France’, research paper presented at the ‘Psy Studies’ (History of Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Related Disciplines) Seminar, University of Cambridge, November 2004.
‘The Cultural Practices of Eros and Thanatos’, presentation of research project to inaugurate the London French Research Seminar, February 2004
‘Baise-moi or the Pluralization of the Desiring Gaze’, paper presented at the Institute of Romance Studies conference on ‘Focalizing the Body: Contemporary Women’s Filmmaking and Writing in France’, London, October, 2003.
‘Perversion, Frigidity and Feminism: Polanski’s Deneuve’, paper presented at the Popular European Cinema Conference on ‘Methods and Stars’, University of Stockholm, Sweden, July 2003 (I also organized, convened and chaired the panel on Catherine Deneuve.).
Invited, with Dany Nobus, to co-present a session entitled ‘Autassassinophilia: From Sexology to Phenomenology’ at the Critical Sexology Seminar, St Pancras Hospital, London, May 2003.
One of four invited discussants (alongside two clinical psychologists and a researcher in gynaecology) on the topic: ‘Is There Such a Thing as Sexual Dysfunction?’ at the Critical Sexology Seminar, St Pancras Hospital, London, February 2003.
‘Corpus Delecti of the Other’, keynote lecture given at the ‘Foreign Bodies’ conference, at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, September 2002.
‘“Vrai meurtrier et faux poète”: From Murder, Through Text, To Heroism. The Cases of Lacenaire and Pierre Rivière’, paper presented at Society of French Studies Conference, Bristol, July 2002.
‘Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in Female-Authored Literature and Film’, paper presented at the Manchester University French Department conference on ‘Sex and the Sacred’, May 2002.
‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction’, invited paper presnted in the Modern French Research Seminar Series, University of Cambridge, March 2002.
‘“The Centre Cannot Hold”: Fragmented Subjectivities in Decadent French Fiction and the Late-Twentieth-Century American Thriller’, visiting lecture given at the University of Durham, February 2002.
‘Between Men and Women; Beyond Heterosexuality: Limits and Possibilities of the Erotic in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed and Patrice Leconte’s La Fille sur le Pont’, paper presented at the Romance Studies conference on ‘New Sexual/Textual Perceptions: The Portrayal of Gender at the Dawn of the New Millennium’, September 2001.
‘Rachilde’s actes gratuits: Establishing the Gender of Violence’, paper presented at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference, University of Urbana, Illinois, USA, October 2000.
‘Beautiful Murders: Aestheticizing Violence in the French fin de siècle’, paper presented at The Modern French Research Seminar, All Souls College, University of Oxford, June 2000.
