Education
Queen Mary, University of London.
(French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essen...)
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essential reading for students in departments of literature, history, sociology and cultural studies. His work on the institutions of mental health and medicine, the history of systems of knowledge, literature and literary theory, criminality and the prison system, and sexuality, has had a profound and enduring impact across the humanities and social sciences. This introductory book, written for students, offers in-depth critical and contextual perspectives on all of Foucault's major published works. It provides ways in to understanding Foucault's key concepts of subjectivity, discourse, and power and explains the problems of translation encountered in reading Foucault in English. The book also explores the critical reception of Foucault's works and acquaints the reader with the afterlives of some of his theories, particularly his influence on feminist and queer studies. This book offers the ideal introduction to a famously complex, controversial and important thinker.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521682991/?tag=2022091-20
(In the nineteenth century, literature shared with the med...)
In the nineteenth century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. While fetishism, sadism and masochism still resonate as concepts with critical currency, necrophilia has received little attention. In this groundbreaking study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexual desire, relocating it as a symptom and a pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the nineteenth-century French canon the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with foundational European texts of sexology and psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, the conventions of nineteenth-century literary scholarship, and feminist critiques of the 'masculine' morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in nineteenth-century France and beyond.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1900755653/?tag=2022091-20
( The subject of murder has always held a particular fasc...)
The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely? In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/022600354X/?tag=2022091-20
( Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of f...)
Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415409276/?tag=2022091-20
Queen Mary, University of London.
She is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. Downing"s work is innovative in its dialogue between the critical humanities and the sciences, especially psychiatry. Her published work focuses principally on theories of sexual perversion and queer theory.
The work of Michel Foucault.
Ethical philosophy and film. And, most recently, the cultural meanings of criminality.
Downing trained in Modern European Languages and Literatures at the Universities of London and Oxford. She took up a Lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London in 1999, where she was promoted to Reader in 2005.
She was appointed to a Chair at the University of Exeter in 2006, at the age of 31.
In 2012, Downing moved to an established Chair at the University of Birmingham. She is one of co-organisers of the interdisciplinary seminar series "Critical Sexology".
( Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of f...)
(In the nineteenth century, literature shared with the med...)
(French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essen...)
( The subject of murder has always held a particular fasc...)
Academia Europaea.