Lisa Downing (/ˈdaʊnɪŋ/; born 1974) is an author and academic. She is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham.^[1]

Downing's work is innovative in its dialogue between the critical humanities and the sciences, especially psychiatry. Her published work focuses principally on theories of sexual perversion and queer theory; the work of Michel Foucault; ethical philosophy and film; and, most recently, the cultural meanings of criminality.

Background and career

Downing trained in Modern European Languages and Literatures at the Universities of London and Oxford. She took up a Lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London in 1999, where she was promoted to Reader in 2005. She was appointed to a chair at the University of Exeter in 2006, at the age of 31.^[2] In 2012, Downing moved to an established chair at the University of Birmingham.

She is one of co-organisers of the interdisciplinary seminar series "Critical Sexology".

Awards

Downing received a 2009 Philip Leverhulme Prize, a prize "awarded to outstanding scholars under the age of 36 who have made a substantial contribution to their field of study, are recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise."^[3]

Works

Books as author

• Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford, EHRC, 2003)
• Patrice Leconte (French Film Directors Series; Manchester University Press, 2004)
• The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
• Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (co-authored with Libby Saxton; Routledge, 2009)
• The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (Chicago University Press, 2013)^[4]
• Fuckology (Chicago University Press, 2014) co-authored with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, a critical analysis of the legacy of psychologist and sexologist John Money.^[5] New Scientist described the book as "ably capturing" Money's story^[6] while Susan Stryker described the book as a "careful, critical and nuanced" analysis of Money's career.^[5]

Books as editor

• Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (with Sarah Capitanio, Paul Rowe and Nick White; Peter Lang, 2005)
• Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (with Dany Nobus; Karnac Books, 2006)
• Birth and Death in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (with Nigel Harkness, Sonya Stephens and Tim Unwin; Rodopi, 2007)
• From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (with Sue Harris; Manchester University Press, 2007)
• Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (with Robert Gillett; Ashgate, 2011)