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Copjec wins fellowship with Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
A UB faculty member has won a prestigious fellowship with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
COPJEC
Joan Copjec, UB Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, will spend the 2004-2005 academic year at the institute working on a project entitled "Kiarostami's Reserve: Shame, Cinema and the Social Bond."
She is among 46 fellows selected for 2004-05—among them creative artists, humanists, social scientists and scientists—who will work individually and across disciplines on projects chosen for both quality and long-term impact.
Recent past fellows have included fiction writer Zadie Smith, author and attorney Jennifer Harbury, geophysicist Maria Zuber, historian Darlene Clark Hine and anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff.
"The purpose of a residential fellowship like ours is to bring artists and scholars together to interact in ways that will change both them and their work," said Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. "We strive to offer enough similarity—clusters of common intellectual concern—and enough difference to generate intersections that are predictable, as well as ones that are unanticipated and even surprising."
Copjec's primary fields of research are psychoanalysis, film and film theory, feminism, and art and architecture. She serves as director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture in the College of Arts and Sciences, which brings together faculty and graduate students interested in investigating the clinical and nonclinical implications of Freudian theory.
She is the author of two books: "Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists" (MIT Press, 1994) and "Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation" (MIT, 2002). She also has edited numerous books, and edited the influential journal October.
Copjec has taught at various schools of architecture, among them the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, Sci-Arc in Los Angeles and the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at CUNY.
She earned a master's degree in contemporary literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; a diploma in film from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, and a doctorate in cinema studies from New York University.