Current affiliation: Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Convenor of research and postgraduate study in interdisciplinary Sexuality and Gender Studies across the institution.
Click here for Lisa Downing’s page at the University of Birmingham.
For all enquiries, including expressions of interest in supervision for postgraduate study, please email.
Academic biography:
Originally trained in modern European languages, literatures, and thought at the Universities of London and Oxford, Lisa Downing read for a DPhil from 1996-1999, under the supervision of the late Prof. Malcolm Bowie, on French literature and discourses of necrophilia. (This was published as Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature in 2003). She has since worked at Queen Mary University of London, the University of Exeter, and the University of Birmingham.
After 7 years at Queen Mary (6 as Lecturer, 1 as Reader), she was appointed to a Chair in French Discourses of Sexuality at Exeter in 2006, aged 31. In 2009, she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded to “outstanding scholars under the age of 36 who have made a substantial contribution to their field of study and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise”. This prize provided her with two years of funded research leave from Exeter from 2010-2012. She then took up an established Chair at Birmingham in September 2012.
During the two-year period of research leave, she completed a major monograph about the gendering and othering of the figure of the murderer from 1830 to the present day, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer, which appeared in March 2013 with the University of Chicago Press, and worked on a co-authored book with Dr Iain Morland and Dr Nikki Sullivan about the work of the late sexologist John Money. The cheekily titled Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts appeared in 2015, also with Chicago UP. Lisa’s sections of the book explore Money’s contribution to the controversial perversion/ paraphilia diagnosis.
More recently, Lisa has published an edited collection entitled After Foucault (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and completed a major monograph entitled Selfish Women (2019) which examines cultural narratives surrounding those women who refuse the gendered imperative of collectivism, insisting instead on individualism as a liveable female position. In 2021-22, Lisa was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to work on her current book project, Against Affect.
Current and future research:
(1) ‘Against Affect’ : This book project explores the ways in which the so-called ‘affective turn’ within the academic humanities has coincided with a cultural shift in public discourse concerning reason, feeling, freedom of expression, and identity. It argues for a feelings-free, pro-rational feminist response to the ills of populism, identity politics-based factionalism, and anti-intellectualism. The Leverhulme Trust funded a year-long Fellowship in 2021-22 to enable the writing of this short, polemical manifesto.
(2) ‘Critical Freedoms’: This project critically examines the concept of freedom broadly – and of freedom of expression in particular – through the lens of concepts and insights from modern critical theory and the continental philosophical tradition. It addresses the ways in which, and reasons why, ‘freedom’ is often assumed to be a value of the Right wing and asks what those of other political affiliations risk losing when they allow and endorse this. Relatedly, it addresses how the rhetoric of ‘choice’, linked with neoliberal models of governmentality, instrumentalizes ideals of individual freedom for particular ideological and economic ends. An initial publication from this project will be an edited Special Issue of the journal Paragraph that will appear in 2023.
Research interests (doctoral supervision offered in all these areas):
History and theories of sexuality and gender; history and politics of sexual ‘perversion’; modern critical theory (particularly feminism, ethics, queer theory, and critical approaches to psychoanalysis); interdisciplinarity; the concept of ‘selfishness’ in philosophy, politics and psychology, and its relation to gender; cultural approaches to crime and criminality, especially the construction of the figure of the murderer; women and power, women and the right wing, women and ‘extremism’.
Publications:
AUTHORED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa, Selfish Women (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).
Downing, Lisa, Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan (co-authored), Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Downing, Lisa, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). [For a feature on The Subject of Murder in the Times Higher Education, see here.]
Downing, Lisa and Libby Saxton (co-authored), Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (and hardback edition) (and Kindle edition) (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
Downing, Lisa, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (and hardback edition) (and Kindle edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) (Official Persian translation published in 2019).
Downing, Lisa, Patrice Leconte (and hardback edition) French Film Directors Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
Downing, Lisa, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature Legenda (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2003).
EDITED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa and Lara Cox (eds), Queering The Second Wave (Special Issue of Paragraph published as a stand-alone book by Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Downing, Lisa, (ed.), After Foucault: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Translation into Croatian of Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Queer in Europe (2011): Queer u Europi (Zagreb: Zagreb Pride, 2013).
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (and Kindle edition) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Downing, Lisa and Sue Harris (eds), From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (and hardback edition) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007; reissued 2011).
Nobus, Dany and Lisa Downing (eds), Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (and Kindle edition) (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 and Lara Cox (eds.), Special Issue of Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory on ‘Queering the Second Wave’, 41:3, 2018.
Downing, Lisa (ed.), 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, ‘”(S)extremism”: Imagining Violent Women in the Twenty-First Century with Navine G. Khan-Dossos and Julia Kristeva’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 43:2, 2020, 212-229.
Downing, Lisa, ‘The Body Politic: Gender, The Right Wing, and “Identity Category Violations”‘, French Cultural Studies, 29:4, 2018, 367-377.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Antisocial Feminism? Monique Wittig, Shulamith Firestone, and Proto-Antisocial Queer’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Special Issue on ‘Queering the Second Wave’, ed. Lisa Downing and Lara Cox, 41:3, 2018, 364-379.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Dying for Sex: Cultural and Forensic Narratives of Autoerotic Death’, New Formations, Special Double Issue on ‘Death and the Contemporary’, ed. Georgina Colby, 89-90, 2017, 137-152. [Available to read online, here.]
Downing, Lisa, ‘Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological “Perversion Theory” and the DSM-5‘s “Paraphilic Disorder” Diagnoses’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44:4, 2015, 1139-1145.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Safewording!: Kinkphobia and Gender Normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey‘, Psychology and Sexuality, 4:1, 2013, 92-102.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Gendered Constructions of the Nightmare in French Nineteenth-Century Medical Writing and Fantastic Fiction’, French Studies, 66:3, 2012, 331-346.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, Queer: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Contentions in France’, Paragraph, Special Issue on ‘Queer Theory’s Return to France’, ed. Oliver Davis and Hector Kolias, 35: 2, 2012, 215-232.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Notes on a Proto-Queer Rachilde: Decadence, Deviance and (Reverse) Discourse in La Marquise de Sade‘, Sexualities, Special Issue on ‘European Culture/ European Queer’, ed. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, 15:1, 2012,16-27.
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 and Robert Gillett, ‘Georges Bataille at the Avant-garde of Queer Theory?: Trangression, Perversion and Death Drive’, Nottingham French Studies, Special Issue on ‘The French Avant-garde’, ed. Stephen Forcer and Emma Wagstaff, 50:3, 2011, 86-100.
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, 2009, 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, ‘Selfish Cinema: Sex, Heroism, and Control in Adaptations of Ayn Rand for the Screen’ in Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts, ed. Neil Cocks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 109-129.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Foucault and True Crime’ in After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 185-200.
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, 2017), 24-34.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity’ in Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (New York: Punctum, 2017), 105-126.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Where’s Girlhood? The Female Child Killer and Tony Hickson’s Where’s Mary?‘, in International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts, ed. Fiona Handyside and Kate E. Taylor-Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153-163.
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, 2014), 249-261.
Downing Lisa, ‘On “Compulsory Sexuality”, Sexualization, and History’, Commissioned Afterword for The Routledge History of Sex and the Body in the West, 1500 to the Present, ed Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 527-533.
Downing, Lisa ‘Sexual Perversion as Textual Resistance in the Writing of Rachilde and Monique Wittig’ in Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology (and Kindle edition) ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 195-212.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology’ in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (and Kindle edition), 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, 6 vols., 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-Blackwell, 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 and New York: 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 1000 WORDS – A SELECTION)
Downing, Lisa, review of Alison Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism,Masochism and Historical Teleology (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2016), in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2017, 26:3, 534-536
Downing, Lisa, ‘Power for Pleasure: Review of Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011)’ in New Formations, 2013, 80-81, 218-220
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, review of Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska (eds), De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate: 2011) in Psychology and Sexuality, 4:3, 2013, 325-328
Downing, Lisa, Review of Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford (eds), Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) in Studies in the Maternal, 4:1, 2012.
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.
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
Affiliate of the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Research Associate of the Centre for Somatechnics, which originated at Macquarie University, Australia, and is now hosted at the University of Arizona, USA.
Critical Sexology
Co-organizer for 10 years (with Dr Meg-John Barker, Open University and Dr Robert Gillett, QMUL) of 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. Lisa also co-moderated the Critical Sexology mailing list and managed the website.
Society of Dix-Neuviémistes
Founding member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (SDN), a UK-based organization for international researchers in nineteenth-century French Studies. (Conference Officer from 2001-2006.)
AHRC Peer Review College
Member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College for the following subjects: Gender and Sexuality; Film History, Theory, Criticism; Media and Communication; French Studies.
Editorial/ advisory board service
Editor of Paragraph, the leading UK journal of critical theory.
Member of editorial board of INSEP: Journal of the International Network of Sexual Ethics and Politics published by Budrich journals.
Member of editorial board of Screen Bodies published by Berghahn.
Member of advisory board of the Taylor & Francis journal Psychology and Sexuality as a non-psychologist offering a theoretical arts and humanities perspective on sexuality studies.
Member of the advisory board of Fabula–Littérature Histoire Théorie (Fabula-LHT) an online French journal of literary and cultural studies.
Member of the peer review college of Studies in French Cinema.
Examination of PhD students:
As External Examiner: two doctoral theses for the University of Oxford (Jason Hartford, 2008; Carellin Brooks, 2010), one for the University of Melbourne, Australia (Romana Byrne, 2010), one for Chichester University (Helen Hester, 2011), one for the University of Edinburgh (Joseph Blessin, 2014), one for Warwick University (Kayte Stokoe, 2017), and one for Brunel University (Emily Cox, 2017).
Supervision of Research Students:
Students currently and formerly supervised include:
Abby Fox (PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2018-present, University of Birmingham) for thesis entitled ‘Dapper Dames, Dita, & Disneyland: Aesthetics of Power and Play in Modern Pin-Up Culture’.
Christopher Ryder (co-supervision with Dr Emma Foster, PhD Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2018-present, University of Birmingham) for a thesis entitled ‘Constructions of gender in the propaganda of Islamic State on social media: Recruitment, mobilisation and statehood and the implications for response’.
Daisy Savage (PhD Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2018-present, University of Birmingham) for a thesis entitled ‘Queering Identity, Querying Nation: the Autofiction of Nina Bouraoui and Abdellah Taïa’.
Bethany Osmond (MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies, University of Birmingham, 2018-2019) for a Dissertation on Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Eleanor Hedger (Midlands 3-Cities AHRC-funded PhD, co-supervision with Prof. Andrew Kirkman and Dr Jonathan Willis, University of Birmingham, 2017-present) for a thesis entitled: ‘Singing in the Face of Death:Music and Martyrdom during the English Reformation 1553-1649’.
Abbey Rees-Hales (Midlands 3-Cities AHRC-funded PhD, co-supervision with Dr Camilla Smith and Dr Katherine Shingler, University of Birmingham, 2017-present) for a thesis entitled ‘SEx-Libris: Women Artists and the Trade in Erotic Illustrated Books in Europe and the United States, 1914-1934’.
Amy Gunn (MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies, University of Birmingham, 2017-2019) Dissertation entitled: ‘How do female consumers of pornography perceive female performers and female directors of pornography?’.
Azadeh Sarjooghian (MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016-2018) Dissertation entitled: ‘Resistance and Visual Strategies: The Representation of Female Identity in Contemporary Iranian Art’. (2nd supervisor of doctoral thesis commencing October 2018.)
Abigail Nicoll (MRes in Sexuality and Gender Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016-2018) for a Dissertation on young women and Influences on academic subject choices.
Connor Murphy (Midlands 3-Cities AHRC-funded PhD, co-supervised at Nottingham Trent University and University of Birmingham, 2016-present) for a thesis entitled ‘”Love Me or Kill Me”: Desire and Trauma in the Theatre of Sarah Kane’.
Katie Masters (MRes Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2014-15, University of Birmingham) for a Dissertation on feminist/ antipsychiatry perspectives on women with social anxiety disorder. Passed in February 2016. (1st supervisor of doctoral thesis commencing October 2018.)
Tamsin Lee (MRes Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2014-15, University of Birmingham) for a Dissertation on popular music, coming-out narratives, and LBGTQ identity. Passed in February 2016.
Gurbax Matoo (co-supervision with Dr Emma Foster, PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2014-present, University of Birmingham) for a thesis entitled ‘Mothers or Monsters? A Comparative Study of South Asian and White Women Who Kill Children in the UK’.
Henrietta Phillips (AHRC-funded PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2012-2016, University of Birmingham) for a thesis entitled ‘Cultural Representations of the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper in Relation to Class and Gender Discourses of The North’.
Martin Baxter (co-supervision with Dr Helen Vassallo: PhD in Sexuality and Gender Studies, 2010-2013, University of Exeter) for a thesis entitled: ‘Questioning the Reformability of Western Civilization’s Rape Culture’.
Elena Lipsos (co-supervision with Dr Corinna 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 (AHRC-funded 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’.
Lara Cox (co-supervision with Dr David Houston Jones: MRes 2007-08; AHRC-funded 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’.
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]; AHRC-funded 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:
“(S)extremism”: Imagining Violent Women in the 21st Century’, invited lecture given at the Centre for Visual Cultures Lecture Series, Royal Holloway, University of London, February 2020.
Selfish Women UK and Ireland book tour 2019:
St Bart’s Pathology Museum, London, July 2019
UCD and the Gutter Bookshop, Dublin, Ireland, September 2019
University of Strathclyde, October 2019
University of Edinburgh, October 2019
University of Dundee, October 2019
University of Stirling, October 2019
St Cross College, University of Oxford, November 2019
Nottingham Trent University, December 2019
‘”(S)extremism”: Imagining Violent Women in the 21st Century’, invited paper given under the joint auspices of the Nationalisms and Identities Research Group and the Modern French Research Seminar series, University of Cambridge, November 2018.
‘Gender, the Right Wing, and the Body Politic’, invited paper given in the Geography Department Seminar Series, Maynooth University, Ireland, April 2018.
‘Gender, the Right Wing, and the Body Politic’, keynote paper given at a conference on ‘Imagining the Body in France & the Francophone World’, University of Birmingham, January 2018.
‘How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways…. On Female Narcissism, a Problem in the Psy Sciences’, invited paper given at the Sexual Cultures Research Group Seminar Series, Queen Mary University of London, November 2017.
‘How To Do the Gendered History of Narcissism’, keynote paper given at the ‘French Studies and the Medical Humanities Symposium,’ organized by University of Kent and the Society for French Studies, IGRS, London, November 2017.
‘Antisocial Feminism? Monique Wittg, Shulamith Firestone, and Proto-Queer Theory’, invited seminar paper given at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Sexuality and Gender, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 2017.
‘Echo Chamber: Navine G. Khan-Dossos and Lisa Downing in Conversation, moderated by Annie Fletcher’. Invited Q&A/ Discussion to accompany Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s installation Echo Chamber. Discussion of transgressive narratives relating to women, in this case the phenomenon of young women, particularly in the UK and Europe, who have aligned themselves with violent and radical religious beliefs, thinking about how they see themselves, and, how society views them. At Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, October 2017.
‘Selfish Cinema: Questions of Gender and Control in Adaptations of Ayn Rand for the Screen’, invited lecture delivered for the Film Studies Research Seminar, University of Exeter, March 2017.
‘Niska in Love: On Consciousness, Embodied Cognition, and Sexual Politics in Humans’, paper given at the Lesbian Lives Conference, University of Brighton, February 2017.
‘Feminist Philosophy and Selfishness’, invited seminar paper given in the CAPPE seminar series, University of Brighton, February 2017.
‘How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways…. On Female Narcissism, a Problem in the Psy Sciences’, invited lecture given at the Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, July 2016.
‘Feminist Philosophy and Selfishness’, invited seminar paper given in the School of Modern Languages seminar series, University of Aberdeen, October 2015.
‘Selfish Cinema: Questions of Gender and Control in Adaptations of Ayn Rand for the
Screen’, invited lecture delivered at the Centre for Creative and Critical Cultures, University of Dundee, October 2015.
‘Selfish Cinema: Questions of Gender and Control in Adaptations of Ayn Rand for the
Screen’, invited lecture delivered at the Edinburgh Film Seminar series, University of
Edinburgh, October 2015.
‘Feminist Philosophy and Selfishness’, invited seminar paper given in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures seminar series, University of Glasgow, October 2015.
‘Forms of Control/ The Control of Form: Ayn Rand and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (1949)’, paper given at the annual ‘Film-Philosophy’ conference, University of Oxford, July, 2015.
‘“Deprived of Self”: On Shulamith Firestone’s Refusal of Self-Sacrifice’, invited intervention at ‘Dialectics of Sex: Past, Present, and Future’, a one-day workshop at Queen Mary, University of London, May 2015.
‘Shadow Sisters: Monique Wittig, Shulamith Firestone, and Proto- Antisocial Queer’, paper given in a specially constituted panel (with Dr Lara Cox and Kayte Stokoe) on ‘Anglo-French Proto-Queer Feminisms’ at the Lesbian Lives Conference, University of Brighton, February 2015.
Invited to be the respondent at a workshop on A Critical Genealogy of Normality, organized by Prof. Peter Cryle, University of Queensland, Australia and Dr Elizabeth Stephens, Southern Cross University, Australia, held at the Wellcome Trust, London, December 2014.
‘Selfish Women and Other Inconvenient Deviants’, Professorial Inaugural Lecture delivered at the University of Birmingham, November 2014. [A video of my lecture is available here.]
‘Queering Feminist Consent: Is It a Matter of “Borrowing from the Boys?”’, working paper given at a two-day workshop on ‘Consent: A capacious and contentious concept in feminist, legal, philosophical, and queer contexts’, organized with Tim Dean at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham, November 2013.
‘Loving Life: From Fromm’s Biophilia to Money’s Normophilia’, invited paper given at a conference on ‘Making Love, Making Gender, Making Babies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s’, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, September 2013.
‘Sorting the Acceptable from the Unacceptable: Defining the Pathological in Classic Sexological Perversion Theory and the DSM-5‘s Paraphilia Diagnoses’, invited paper given at a conference on ‘Classifying Sex’, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, July 2013.
‘Romancing the Cannibal: Genre and Gender Trouble in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (1999)’, keynote lecture given at the International Crime Genre Research Group’s conference on ‘Gender and Sexuality in the Crime Genre’, the National University of Ireland, Galway, June 2013.
Invited to be the respondent to Prof. Tim Dean’s keynote lecture at a day workshop on ‘Queer Theorizations of Bareback in Three National Contexts’, part of the AHRC-funded project on ‘Queer Theory in France’, University of Warwick, May 2013.
‘Re-assessing Agency and Consent in Queer and Feminist Theory’, invited paper given at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Hull, April 2013.
‘<<Souvent dans l’être obscur habite un dieu caché>>: Hybrid Theosophy and Anti-Psychiatry in Nerval’s Les Chimères‘, conference paper given at the Society of Dix-Neuviémiste’s 11th Annual Conference, University of Exeter, April 2013.
‘A Radical Feminist Serial Killer?: Aileen Wuornos and Lesbophobic Panic in the USA’, keynote lecture given at the Lesbian Lives conference, University of Brighton, February 2013.
‘Cultural Narratives of Erotic Asphyxiation’, public lecture given at an event of the Wellcome-funded ‘Damaging the Body’ project, St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, London, December 2012.
‘Normophilia and Biophilia in John Money’s Sexology’, invited lecture given at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Sexuality and Gender, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 2012.
‘Feminism, the Female Killer, and the Threat to the Phallic Order’, invited paper given at ‘Cinema, Sexualities, Theory’, a conference to commemorate the retirement of Professor Keith Reader, IGRS, University of London, June 2012.
‘Safewording!: Cultural Disavowal of the Female “Pervert” and the Reassuring Function of Fifty Shades of Grey‘, invited paper given at a conference on ‘Bodies: Flesh, Performance, Media, Disgust and Desire’, organized by the Onscenity Network, Birkbeck, University of London, June 2012.
‘Aileen Wuornos: The Spectre of the Radical Feminist Serial Killer’, keynote lecture given at a day workshop on ‘The Female ‘Other’: Subversive Women in 19th- and 20th-Century Literary and Cultural Production’, University of Warwick, May 2012.
‘On “Infanticidal” Femininity: The Case of Myra Hindley’, keynote lecture given at the ‘Roles’ Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies Colloquium, University of Birmingham, May 2012.
‘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, University of 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 University of 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 University of 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, University of 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 presented 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.