Angela Hunter, Assistant Professor
Office: Stabler Hall, Room 307
Phone: 501-683-7066
Email: anhunter@ualr.edu
Introduction
I am the Coordinator for the MALS Program here, which involves teaching, advising, and program development. I really enjoy working closely with the MA students and seeing their interdisciplinary theses/projects develop. I also teach in the Liberal Arts BA degree program, which draws a wide variety of students. I come from a background of Comparative Literature (French and German literature, mainly of the 18th-19th-centuries, and continental philosophy with a heavy emphasis on the French), and I’m also very interested in literary theory, feminist/gender and queer theory, and psychoanalysis in theory and in practice. I serve as book review editor for a journal called Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. Something you will discover if you come to my office is that I’m a Freud buff, and I own all 23 volumes of the Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud. In my spare time I enjoy playing kickball, being active with the Big Brothers/ Big Sisters organization, doing yoga (ashtanga or hatha), and making very hot chile sauces.
Teaching Interests
- Areas of Specialization:
- Interdisciplinary studies
- Comparative Literature
- French literature and language
I teach interdisciplinary courses at UALR such as Reasoning Across the Disciplines, Liberal Arts colloquium, Introduction to Liberal Studies, and the Liberal Studies colloquium. I also teach some philosophy—Philosophy and Literature, and Feminist Philosophy. Before coming to UALR, I taught courses in Comparative Literature (classical, modern and special topics), French literature and language, and Visual Culture. I have incorporated philosophy (particularly continental philosophy) as well as other areas (linguistics, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonial theory) into my courses, and I hope to continue to broaden my own (and my students’) disciplinary horizons.
- Courses which were regularly taught:
- Reasoning Across the Disciplines
- Introduction to Liberal Studies
- Liberal Studies Colloquium
- Liberal Arts Colloquium
Research Interests
My research focuses on several broad areas: the body and sexual difference in literature and philosophy (mainly 19th-20th-century), romantic love and subjectivity (specifically in 18th-20th-century literature), psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory as cultural critique (particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, a famous and even infamous French psychoanalyst). My dissertation explored the relations between love, reading and sexual difference in texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stendhal, Charles Baudelaire, and Jacques Derrida.
Selected Professional Activities
2008 “Signs of Reading and the Subject of Love in Stendhal’s De l’Amour.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 36.3-4
2007 “Rousseau’s Queer Bottom: Sexual Difference in the Confessions.” Volume XXXIV of French Literature Series. Rodopi Press
2005 “Where to Place Feminine Sexuality?: (Re)reading Encore.” Review Essay on Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and Feminine Sexuality (SUNY, 2004). In Journal of Lacanian Studies.
2005 “Bottoms Up: The Obscenity of Difference in Rousseau’s Confessions.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Montreal, Canada
2004 “Becoming Written: Nietzsche on Nietzsche in Ecce Homo.” Midsouth Philosophy Conference. University of Memphis,
2004 “Looking Beyond the Libido for the Lost Ego Instincts.” Review of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Where do we fall when we fall in love? (Other Press, 2003). For Metapsychology Online. http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&id=2061
2002 “Disfigurement, Drive, Desire: Objects of Love and Jouissance in Rousseau and Stendhal.” Psychoanalytic Studies Graduate Presentation Series.
2001 “The Object Little Pox: Reading Baudelaire Reading Stendhal (Reading Rousseau).” Modern Language Association. New Orleans , LA
2001 “Signs and Symptoms of the Subject in Stendhal’s De l’Amour.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Seattle , WA
2000 “Différance and the Metaphysics of First Love in ‘Hairband’ Rock Ballads.” Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 2000
1999 “Ethics, Ontology and Difference: A Feminist Reading of Derrida and Levinas.” Philosophy and the Feminine Conference. Vanderbilt University
1998 “Enlightened Abuses and Pedagogical Imperatives: The Body of Philosophy in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir.” Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference. Williams College
1998 “Postmodern Spacings.” Collaborative online project published in Post Modern Culture Journal, vol. 8, #3, May 1998 (also archived at: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~mplanet/submit/)
Educational Background
Ph.D. Comparative Literature (minor in Psychoanalytic Studies), 2004
Emory University
M.A. Comparative Literature, 2000
Emory University
M.A. French Literature, 1997
New York University
B.A. Comparative Literature (minor in Women Studies), 1994
Colorado College (magna cum laude)