Dr Lynn Turner

Academic qualifications

PhD Cultural Studies (University of Leeds) 2002
MA Cultural Studies (University of Leeds) 1995
BA (Hons) Fine Art (Newcastle Polytechnic - now the University of Northumbria) 1990

Teaching

I teach an MA Special Subject called 'Sex, Gender, Species' and a level 3 BA option on ‘Sexual Poetics,’ as well as contributing to the MA Core Course.

Areas of supervision

I currently supervise projects on film and the politics of the name; skin and species in South African art; taxidermy in contemporary art; pleasure and/in feminist art; women, food and art, and have recently supervised to completion an AHRC-funded thesis on autoimmunity and science fiction. I welcome proposals for research on animal and sexual differences; contemporary visual culture, aural culture particularly the voice/speech relation, science fiction; deconstruction; feminism, queer theory.

Grants & awards

British Academy Overseas Conference Grant 2010
AHRC Research Leave Scheme 2007-2008
British Academy studentship (3 years + fees) 1997-2000

Professional activities

Member of the Critical Posthumanism Network

Advisory Board member, zetesis: research generated by curiosity.

Arts Editor of parallax

Prospectus Referee for Edinburgh University Press, Columbia University Press

External Examiner for the MA in Reception, University of Bristol

Referee for journals; Derrida Today, Somatechnics, Theory, Culture & Society, Sexualities; Body & Society; Women: A Cultural Review; parallax

Keynote lectures

2011

'Tape Plays Teletribunals' at Legal Media: A Colloquium in memory of Cornelia Vismann, Goldsmiths/Birkbeck/The Showroom

2002

'The Kinshipping Forecast' at The Future Past of Visual Culture, Tate Britain, London

Papers presented

2013

'Tympan Alley' Biomediations: Art, Life, Media, Goldsmiths

‘Insect Asides (Deconstruction is/in Performance Philosophy’ What is Performance Philosophy? Staging a New Field, University of Surrey.

2012

'Secrets & Lies: eating in the darkness in China Mieville's Embassytown' at Cosmopolitan Animals, University of Kent

2011

'Two Genetically Modified Films' at Life Itself, Goldsmiths

2010

'Animal Transference' at Freud After Derrida, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg

'Homing Pigeon: the Postal Principle in Lynn Hershmann's Conceiving Ada' at Derrida Today, London

'Animal Transference' at Zoontotechnics: Animality/Technicity, Cardiff University

'The Edges of a Limit that Grows: When Species Kiss' at Creaturely Lives, Goldsmiths

2009

'Telecommunications: the Undoing of DNA' at the 7th European Feminist Research Conference, Utrecht, Netherlands

'The Edges of a Limit that Grows: When Species Kiss' at Creative Practice, York St John University, UK

2008

'Seeks-zoos: some recent correspondence between animals' at Writing in a Post-Derridean Era, Vaxjo University, Sweden

2003

'Wind up: the performative speech acts of Tape' at Warp Woof: Aurality, Musicality, Textuality, University of Leeds

'Des Jeunes Nees: for a confusion of the tongue, the lip and the rim' at Writing Aesthetics, IAPL, University of Leeds

2000

'A Reservation with Feminism, Film & Theory' at 10th Anniversary Feminale Frauen Film Festival, Cologne, Germany

Research interests

My research explores how animal and sexual differences matter in visual and aural culture as well as philosophy and literature. Who we are and/as who we are following (in Derrida's locution), become yet more sharply focused questions when taken together with who we call kin and what or whom we eat.  

I am the editor of a volume called The Animal Question in Deconstruction [EUP, 2013] and co-editor, with Lindsay Kelley, of a special issue of parallax called 'bon appetit,' [2013].  This year I am completing my single-authored book Machine-Events: autobiographies of the performative. There I argue that performativity not only crosses organic and synthetic but troubles the discourse of species. The book makes major interventions into relations between feminism, deconstruction, critical animal studies and visual culture through closely read cinematic case studies (including works by Lars von Trier, Richard Linklater, Lynn Hersmann and others).

Future research will be directed to what Evelyn Fox Keller calls a ‘radically transformed bestiary’ informed by both science and science fiction.

Selected publications

Books:
Machine-Events: autobiographies of the performative in visual culture (a monograph, forthcoming)

The Animal Question in Deconstruction (edited collection, under contract with Edinburgh University Press) 2013

(with Astrid Schmetterling), Visual Cultures as ... Recollection, Berlin: Sternberg,  2013.

Edited journals:

'Bon Appetit' parallax 19:1, 2013 (co-edited with Lindsay Kelley)

‘Random Figures’ parallax 8:1 2002 (co-edited with Marcel Swiboda & Cylena Simonds)

‘Immanent Trajectories’, parallax 7:4 2001 (co-edited with Marcel Swiboda & Cylena Simonds)

‘Hot Property’, parallax 7:2 2001 (co-edited with Marcel Swiboda & Cylena Simonds)

Chapters in Books:

‘Animal Melancholia: on the scent of Dean Spanley’ in Animality & the Moving Image, Laura McMahon & Michael Lawrence, eds. Columbia University Press, 2014.

'Insect Asides' in The Animal Question in Deconstruction, Lynn Turner, ed. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

‘The course of a general displacement, or, The course of the choreographer’ pp.50-66 in The Origins of Deconstruction, Martin McQuillan & Ika Willis, eds. Palgrave, 2009.

Journal articles:

'Telefoam: species on the shores of Derrida and Cixous' in European Journal of English Studies, 2014.

'Tympan Alley: posthuman performatives in Dancer in the Dark' in  Derrida Today, 6.2, 2013.

'Animal & Sexual Differences: Kelly Oliver's Continental Bestiary' in Body & Society, 19.4, 2013. (online first)

'Hors d'Oeuvre: some footnotes on Dorothy Cross's Spurs' pp. 3-11 in parallax 19:1, 2013.

'UnHoming Pigeons: the Postal Principle in Lynn Hershmann Leeson & Hussein Chalayan' pp.92-110 in Derrida Today, 5.1. 2012. 

'Animal Transference: a "mole-like progression" in C. J. Cherryh' pp. 163-175 in Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 44.3, 2011.

'When Species Kiss: some recent correspondence between animots' pp.60-85 in Humanimalia, 2:1, 2010, online: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/

'Seeks-Zoos: some recent correspondence with animals' pp.10-21 in The Issues in Contemporary Culture & Aesthetics, No. 2-3, 2009.

‘stop looking for some single defining difference’: the ongoing Arkhe of Donna Haraway’ pp.142-145 in parallax, 14:3, 2008.

‘Wind up: the Machine-Event of Tape’ pp.112-135 in Camera Obscura, 64, 2007.

‘Differential Vibrations: on things that go buzz in the night’ pp.437-439 in The Journal of Visual Culture, 6:3, 2007.

‘Des Jeunes Nées: for a confusion of the tongue, the lip, & the rim’ pp.171-178, in The Issues in Contemporary Culture & Aesthetics, No.1, 2005.

‘Sexual Difference’ pp.317-32 in The Year’s Work in Cultural & Critical Theory, Vol.11, 2003.

‘Braiding polyphony: Je tu il elle (& lui)’ pp.94-100, in Performance Research, 8:1, 2003.

‘Translation Reading Sex’ pp.57-70 in parallax, 8: 4, 2002.

‘Lift off: il n’y a pas de deux hors texte’ pp.372-374 in The Journal of Visual Culture, 1:3, 2002.

‘Translating John Malkovich’ pp.132-137 in Performance Research, 7:2, 2002.

‘Documentary Friction: Visual & Vocal Strategies in Surname Viet: Given Name Nam’ pp.81-93 in parallax 1:3, 1997.