Professor Amber Jacobs

Overview

Biography

Amber Jacobs' research background is in literature, feminist philosophy,  psychoanalysis, ancient Greek myth and tragedy, visual culture.

Her monograph, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother is an intervention into classical psychoanalysis via structural anthropology and feminist philosophy that posits a new post-patriarchal theory of the symbolic order.

She has published articles on psychoanalytic feminism, feminist philosophy, representations of the mother-daughter relation, gender and sexuality in cinema, literature, visual culture and feminist thought.

Her current work involves both theoretical and audiovisual practice based work ranging from re-workings and re tellings of myth to new readings of Ancient Greek and Mesopotamian mythology.

Research

Research interests

• Psychoanalysis - Post-Freudian tradition ( Freud, Klein, Lacan, Bion, Winnicott, Andre Green, Laplanche).
• Psychoanalytic feminist theory and feminist philosophy - my research is concerned with theorising beyond the classical Oedipal paradigm. I am especially interested in the work of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Juliet Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin Jean Laplanche (among others) as post Lacanian theorists who are attempting to think through a post-patriarchal symbolic order.
• Ancient Greek myth and tragedy (feminist interpretations and political uses of) and contemporary recycling of myth in literature, culture and theory.
• Writing and sexual difference, particularly contemporary literature by women.
• Theories and constructions of the maternal both in psychoanalytic feminism and contemporary culture.
• Representations and constructions of misogyny in cinema, literature and visual arts.
• Visual culture, theories of gender and spectatorship, film theory, feminist cinema and practice as research (audiovisual practices).
• Audio visual practice based work (soundscape/video work, fine art)

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

8

I welcome proposals for PhD supervision in the following areas:

-feminist and psychosocial theory and philosophy, cinema and visual culture, ancient greek myth and tragedy, gender and sexualities, audiovisual practice based research.

Publications