Teresa de Lauretis

Teresa de Lauretis was born and educated in Italy. Shortly after receiving her PhD in Modern Languages and Literatures from Bocconi University in Milan, she moved to the United States and held academic positions at the Universities of Colorado, California and Wisconsin, where she taught Italian language and literature, semiotics, feminist studies and film studies. In 1985 she was appointed Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has also held visiting professorships in Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina and the United States. Among her many honours, she received honorary doctorates from the University of Lund (Sweden) and the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina). Since retiring in 2008 as Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness, de Lauretis has continued to give lectures and seminars internationally. In the summer semester of 2017, she was a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin.

De Lauretis is the author of ten books, including Alice Doesn't, Technologies of Gender, The Practice of Love, Figures of Resistance, Freud's Drive, and more than one hundred essays originally written in English or Italian. She has edited or co-edited three collections of essays and two special issues of journals, including "Queer Theory" on differences. Anthologies of her work have been published in French, Spanish, Italian and Finnish, and her writings have been translated into 14 other languages. A symposium on her work was held at Swarthmore College on 5-7 November 2015. She is currently working on a theory of reading and spectatorship based on figurality and the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and translation. In progress: "The Sum of All Her Yesterdays", a reading of Djuna Barnes' The Antiphon. (2019)

Works

• La sintassi del desiderio: struttura e forme del romanzo sveviano, Ravenna: Longo, 1976, 175 pp. (Italian)

• editor, Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies: "Theoretical Perspectives in Cinema" (with David Allen), 1977. Special issue.

• The Technological Imagination (editor, with Andreas Huyssen and Kathleen Woodward), Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980.

• The Cinematic Apparatus (editor, with Stephen Heath), New York: St. Martin’s Press, and London: Macmillan, 1980, x+213 pp.

• Umberto Eco, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981, 111 pp. (Italian)

• Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, London: Macmillan, 1984, 219 pp; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
  • Alicia ya no: feminismo, semiótica, cine, trans. Silvia Iglesias Recuero, Madrid: Cátedra, 1992, 295 pp. (Spanish)

• Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (editor), Palgrave Macmillan, 1986.

• Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, University of Indiana Press, 1987, 151 pp, IA.

• Differenza e indifferenza sessuale, Firenze: Estro Editrice, 1989. (Italian)

• "The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain", differences 1:2, Summer 1989, pp 3-37. [1]

• editor, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6(2-3): "Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities", 1990. Special issue.

• Sui generis. Scritti di teoria femminista, trans. Liliana Losai, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996, 183 pp. Collected essays translated from the orig. English, with the exception of the Italian text "Salve Regina". (Italian)

• Soggetti eccentrici, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999, 142 pp. Collection of four previously published articles and papers, newly revised, with some rendered into Italian for the first time. TOC. (Italian)

• The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
  • Pratica d'amore: percorsi del desiderio perverso, Milan: Tartaruga, 1997. (Italian)
  • Die andere Szene. Psychoanalyse und lesbische Sexualität, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. (German)

• Théorie queer et cultures populaires: de Foucault à Cronenberg, pref. Pascale Molinier, trans. Marie-Hélène Bourcier, Paris: La Dispute, 2007, 189 pp; new ed., afterw. Maxime Cervulle, Paris: La Dispute, 2023, 207 pp. TOC. (French)

• Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory, intro. Patricia White, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. TOC.

• Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, x+190 pp.
  • Pulsions freudiennes. Psychanalyse, littérature et cinéma, trans. Jacques Brunet-Georget, Paris: PUF, 2010, 232 pp. Publisher. (French)

• Diferencias: etapas de un camino a través del feminismo, trans. María Echániz Sans, Madrid: Horas y horas, 2000, 173 pp. Collection of six essays. (Spanish)

Links

• Profile on UC Santa Cruz
• Wikipedia