Vicky Lebeau
Professor Of English (Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence)

Research

I have published widely in the field of psychoanalysis and the humanities, with a particular focus on visual fields. I am a Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, with particular interests in the space between clinical and creative thinking.

My current project, 'Feeling Poor: psychoanalysis and class', brings psychoanalysis into contact with issues of class and class difference. The question of difference has been central to my research (from the representation of sexuality in cinema to the figure of the black child in civil rights discourse). Bringing the issue of class to the fore, 'Feeling Poor' draws on published work on New British Cinema (Shane Meadows, Lynne Ramsay) as well as a psychoanalysis of deprivation and hatred (e.g. Lebeau, 'Aphanisis: Patricia Williams and Ernest Jones'). The work of D.W. Winnicott is vital to this research, as is the figure of the mother in memoir, fiction and theory. More broadly, I am interested in bridging the apparent divide between Jacques Lacan - so influential to the development of film theory - and Winnicott/the British Independent Tradition. 

I welcome enquiries about doctoral supervision in psychoanalysis, visual and literery culture (late 19th- contemporary), and medical humanities. My approach to psychoanalysis is as a diverse form of creative practice, and a (very various) body of theory, practice and institution with its own histories and forms of knowledge (i.e. it cannot be straightforwardly 'applied' to cultural texts). I am a trainee member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation and the British Psychoanalytic Council and interested to work with postgraduates researching the cusp between cultural and clinical thinking..

I also have particular interests in 20th and 21st century women's fiction (e.g. Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble) as well as contemporary cultural forms (e.g. cinema - art and popular - from British social realism to horror). I am very committed to the idea of popular culture as a form of critical thinking and to moving away from models of 'application' of theory to culture. I am used to working with both full and part-time doctoral researchers and am also keen to support those returning to research after periods away from study.