Prof Maria Aristodemou

Overview

Biography

Maria Aristodemou, LLB (Bristol) LLM (Cambridge) joined the School from the University of Bristol as a Senior Lecturer in Law in April 2000. Maria is Assistant Dean for International Links and Enterprise, helping to develop co-operation agreements between the Law School and universities in Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia. She is also Director and Admissions Tutor for the LLM General.

Major administrative roles have included acting as the School’s representative on the College Quality Assurance Committee for five years, monitoring and inspecting rules and processes of other Schools' programmes of study, as well as successfully organising and leading the Law School’s own quality audit.

Maria published "Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously" (Routledge) in 2014. She has been appointed Adjunct Professor at Griffith School of Law, Queensland, Australia. Other recent invitations include Brown University in 2015; the University of Pretoria to teach a Masterclass on 'Law, Film and Ideology' in 2014; the International Symposium of Phenomenology in Perugia; the AIDEL Conference at University of Verona for their annual Law & Literature meeting; the ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) conference in Turin and Athens; and the IVR Conference in Krakow.

Maria's current research explores the intersections between legal and psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly in its Lacanian manifestations. She is on the Advisory Board for a new series of monographs on Critical Studies in Law and the Humanities to be published by Edinburgh University Press.

Research

Research overview

My work addresses cultural texts as a form of law-making with the potential to question, disrupt, and remake other forms of legislation. It is complimentary to, and also a departure from, work pioneered by other Birkbeck scholars which analysed legal texts as a form of literature. My research employs continental critical theory, in particular feminist, psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches, to address texts ranging from Greek myths to contemporary writing, film and popular music.

My current research explores the intersections between legal and psychoanalytic theory and practice, particularly in its Lacanian manifestations. The different conceptions of the human subject in law and in psychoanalysis come in for special attention by pitting terms from legal and political discourse such as guilt, justice, freedom, responsibility, ideology, and democracy against their psychoanalytic counterparts and interrogating them through the awry lens of desire, repression, and above all, enjoyment.

Publications