Professor Lisa Downing
Chair of French Discourses of Sexuality
Address: School of Arts, Languages and Literatures, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK
Email: l.m.downing@exeter.ac.uk

Research interests: cultural and philosophical histories and theories of sexual perversion and paraphilia; death-driven sexuality; the ethics of representing sexuality in literature and film; critiques of psychoanalysis; deconstructive gender studies and queer theory.

Major Publications: Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth- Century French Literature (Oxford: EHRC, 2003), Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing (London: Karnac Books, in press) and From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, ed. Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester University Press, in press)

Current research:
1) a major collaborative interdisciplinary project with Dany Nobus, Brunel University on 'The Cultural Practices of Eros and Thanatos'
2) a major collaborative project with Josep-Anton Fernandez and Robert Gillett (both of Queen Mary, University of London) on the reception of queer theory in Europe
3) a number of smaller projects on the ethics of representing sexuality and violence in the context of contemporary French cinema

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