The Center maintains an extensive library of psychoanalytic literature, administers the Literature and Psychoanalysis Graduate Program in English, and organizes various intellectual events.
Each year we sponsor lectures and seminars by visiting scholars and a Spring Symposium focused on a specific topic of psychoanalytic and cultural interest. In recent years, visiting scholars have included: Parveen Adams, Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jessica Benjamin, Sander Gilman, Mary Jacobus, Claude Lefort, Juliet Flower MacCannell, William Richardson, Slavoj Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic, among others. In the summer we co-sponsor a conference, with the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts (University of Florida, Gainsville) and Paris VII; these conferences are held in various American and European cities.
Graduate
courses are regularly offered in Freud, Lacan, and in psychoanalytic approaches
to a number of fields: film, feminism, political theory, and philosophy,
as well as literature. Since the program does not offer degrees, interested
students must first be accepted into a departmental graduate program or
into the Master of Arts in the Humanities Program. Students may then declare
a concentration in psychoanalysis.
UMBR(a) is a graduate student journal published under the auspices of the Center. The first issue, published in 1995, was a general issue. Since then issues have focused on specific topics: Alain Badiou (1996); Identity and Identification (1997); Drive (1998); Aesthetics and Sublimation (1999); Science and Truth (2000); Polemos (2001); Sameness (2002); and the Law (2003). The upcoming issue is devoted to war.
Center Director: Joan Copjec
Center Faculty: Joan Copjec, Tim Dean, Jim Swan, David Willbern; Ernesto Laclau, Henry Sussman (Comparative Literature); William Egginton, Ramon Soto-Crespo (Romance Languages & Literatures).
Please direct inquiries to psycult@acsu.buffalo.edu