Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Heike Bauer is Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Codirector of the Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Centre. Her main research interests focus on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and culture and the histories and theories of same-sex sexuality. She is editor of Women and Cross-Dressing, 1800–1939 (Routledge, 2006) and has published articles on sexology, Walter Pater, nineteenth-century same-sex culture, and Radclyffe Hall. She is currently completing a book on sexology, translation, and British literary culture from the 1860s to the 1930s.
Chiara Beccalossi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia. Her main focus is how different branches of medicine engaged with the study of female same-sex desires in France, Great Britain, and Italy in the nineteenth century. She is also interested in comparative history and geographies of scientific knowledge.
Peter Cryle is Professor of French and Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. His books include Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative (Cornell University Press, 1996) and The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century France (Delaware University Press, 2002). He is currently working on a history of frigidity with Alison Moore and on the history of sexual pathologies more generally.
Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality and Director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford European Humanities Research Centre, 2003) and The Cambridge Introduction to [End Page 182] Michel Foucault (Cambridge University Press, in press) as well as numerous other publications as author or coeditor in the fields of sexuality and gender studies, modern critical theory, and modern French film and literature.
Michael Finn is Emeritus Professor of French at Ryerson University, Toronto, and the author of Proust, the Body and Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, new paperback edition, 2006), a study of neurasthenia and hysteria in Proust’s life and works. He is currently finishing a book on the impact of late-nineteenth-century medical discourse and hypnosis theory on the works of the French novelist Rachilde.
Rachel Mesch is Assistant Professor of French and Director of Modern Languages at Yeshiva University in New York City. She is the author of The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006) and is currently working on a book-length study of medical and literary constructions of the wife in nineteenth-century France.
Alison Moore is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, the University of Queensland. She has published articles on nineteenth-century European visions of excretion, on notions of frigidity in France of the fin de siècle and interwar period, on historical representation of the tondues in postwar France, and on the politics of sexuality in understandings of Nazism. She is currently working on a book entitled The Anal Imagination: Psychoanalysis, Capitalism and Excretion and is working collaboratively with Peter Cryle on a book about the history of frigidity in French medical and literary texts of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
Peta Allen Shera is an independent scholar. She has taught at the University of Queensland and at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Her 2005 doctoral thesis examined the phenomenon of strange and selfish passions for fabric and drew principally on the work of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) and the American poet and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Caroline Warman is Lecturer in French at Oxford University and a fellow of Jesus College. She has published on Sade and materialism and on literary sexual identities, focusing on Chateaubriand, Custine, and Amiel. Her current research is on atomism at the turn of the nineteenth century in France. [End Page 183]
