Associate Professor Sigi Jottkandt

Sigi Jöttkandt received her PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is Associate Professor in English at the School of the Arts and Media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW. Her specialisations are 19th & 20th Century British and American Literature (especially Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov), She is also deeply interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Continental Philosophy. Her most recent book, The Nabokov Effect, explores the future of reading as a practice of reverse interpretation.

In 2008, she co-founded the international publishing collective, Open Humanities Press, which she also Directs. The same year she co-founded the flagship journal of the Netherlands-based Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, and prior to that, she co-founded the journal Umbr(a). She serves on several editorial boards of professional journals.  In 2014 she was honoured with UNSW's Vice Chancellor's Teaching Award, and she is always happy to talk with prospective students about the joys (and tears) of Higher Degree Research. She teaches across the English programme, and has a particular fondness for including visual texts into literary discussion, such as Magritte's "The Human Condition," which accompanies many theoretical adventures in her course on literary theory. Recently she has been collaborating on several fronts, including an ARC Linkage grant exploring the value of Australian herbaria. 

Books

The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame. London, Open Humanities Press, 2024.

Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic. SUNY Press, 2005.

First Love: A Phenomenology of the One: Beckett, Turgenev, Clare, Welty, Kierkegaard. re.press, 2010.

Edited Collections

Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales. Ed. Prudence Gibson, et. al. London, Open Humanities Press, 2024.

Penumbra: Counter-memories of the Present. Ed. Sigi Jottkandt and Joan Copjec. re.press, 2013.

The Catastrophic Imperative: Time, Subjectivity, Memory in Contemporary Thought. Ed. Dominiek Hoens, Sigi Jottkandt and Gert Buelens. Palgrave, 2009.

Public Talks

"This Q de Telephone": Signs and Symbols, and the Nabokovian Unconscious", IIT Gandinagar, 2019.

"'With a lever...': Beckett, Badiou and the Logics of Sexual Difference," MaMa Institute, Zagreb, 2016.

Selected Publications

'Modern Love Theory', In Understanding Modernism, Understanding Badiou. Ed. Arka Chattopadhyay and Arthur Rose, Bloomsbury, 2024.

History's Hard Sign: Vladimir Nabokov's 'The Visit to the Museum', S : Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, (2020), 119-134. 

'Cordelia's Kiss', in Can Philosophy Love? Reflections and Encounters. Ed. Cindy Zeiher, Rowman and Littlefield, London, 2017.

'X-trails: Notes on another English School', Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 20. 2, (2018).

'Repetition and Inscription in Europe's Dream-Land', Filozofski Vestnik, 37.2 (2016), 289-312. 

'Mathematics in the bedroom: sex, the signifier and the smallest whole number', In Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy. Ed. A. Cerda-Rueda, Karnac Books, 2016.

Keywords:
Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, the long 19thC century, European literature in translation, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, digital humanities, open access