Katharine Swarbrick

Lecturer

Undergraduate teaching

  • Freud in France (Final-year Option)
  • Ecriture féminine and Feminist Theory (Final Year Option)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Literature and Psychoanalysis / Psychoanalysis and Film Theory (contributions to Theory and Methods courses - postgraduate level).

Areas of interest for supervision

PhD topics recently completed under supervision by Dr Swarbrick:

  • “Literature, fantasy and psychoanalysis; Jules Vernes and after.”
  • “Two women and a mirror: comparative studies of women’s writings in the field of psychoanalysis”

Research summary

  • Jacques Lacan
  • Theory and practice of psychoanalysis
  • Enlightenment Studies
  • Avant-Garde

Katharine Swarbrick began her research career by writing on Lacanian perspectives on the psychopathology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau about which she is currently completing a monograph. Her exploration into interrelations between psychoanalytic theory and aspects of Enlightenment has extended into the life and works of Jean-François Marmontel and, more recently, Voltaire.

In the field of Twentieth century European literature, Dr Swarbrick has recently published psychoanalytic interpretations of novels by Virginia Woolf, Marie Darrieussecq and Jacqueline Harpman. In 2012 she opened the Edge of Words research panel at Edinburgh with an inaugural discussion of Lacanian perspectives on the borders of symbolic structures.

She also works on interdisciplinary topics including the relations between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde productions and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Zizek. She has recently examined the poetic dialogue between French surrealist Georges Hugnet and Gertrude Stein.

Project activity

Dr Swarbrick is associate researcher to the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, and official translator to the General Editors of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf.

Postgraduate applications on the relations between psychoanalysis and French literature are welcome.

View all 6 publications on Research Explorer

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