Dr Natalya Lusty

Natalya was appointed to the Department in Februrary 2003. She currently teaches Sex, Violence and Transgression and the cultural studies unit, Everyday Cultures as well as the postgraduate unit, Modernism, Modernity and Modern Culture.

Her research interests include modernism, psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Her contribution to these fileds has been concerned with mapping the terrain of modernism as a cultural diagnostic for our own time, one that performs a number of critical interventions across modernist and contemporary cultural formations. This is also the subject of her book, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.

Her other research interests include theories of violence, visual culture, theories and cultures of everyday life and fashion cultures.

Modernism and Masculinity

This co-edited collection of essays will produce an important genealogical framework for understanding the “crisis of masculinity” that pervades contemporary culture, showing how many of the anxieties and representations that currently beset the ‘masculine’ were also concerns of the modernist enterprise. It will also specify historical and social peculiarities of ‘modernist masculinity’: World War One as the historical wound that genders modernism as a site of masculine loss and excess; the connection between formal experimentation and masculinist coteries invading and commandeering women’s cultural spaces; Freud’s implicit gendering of the modern ‘split subject’ as male and its relation to modernism as a maculinist enterprise.

Dreams: A Cultural History, 1840-1940

This is a collaboarative research project with Dr Helen Groth in the Department of English, Macquarie University. It will produce a groundbreaking history of the emergence of the dream as a fundamental aspect of identity in the period (1840-1940), when the contours of modern psychology were being dramatically transformed in Europe, Northern America and Australia. By tracking the symbiotic relationship between the protean science of the mind and the narrative techniques of literary and visual culture, this project will not only make a significant contribution to the history of our understanding of the mind, it will also develop an innovative research model for examining the interdisciplinary connections across the fields of literature and science.

This project continues the trajectory of my previous work on surrealism and psychoanalysis by exploring those sites of modernism which, although seemingly marginal and peripheral, disclose the complex material and textual formations of the modern social world as they have come to inform more recent disciplinary fields such as sociology, ethnography and cultural studies. Dr Groth’s expertise on photography, optical illusion and ideas of dreaming in Victorian culture make her an ideal collaborative partner.

Books

Lusty, N. (2007). Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate Press)

Lusty, N. and Walker, R. (eds.) (1998). Masochism: Disciplines of Desire/Aesthetics of Cruelty/Politics of Danger. (University of Sydney: PG ARC Publications).

Book Chapters and Articles

Lusty, N. (2003). "Surrealism’s Banging Door" in Textual Practice, Vol. 17, No.2 (June)

Lusty, N. (2002). "Eating the Maid: Leonora Carrington's 'The Debutante'". In Deen, S. (ed.) Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture 1914-1945 (Ashgate Press, pp. 233-272).

Lusty, N. (1998). "The Detached Eye: Surrealism’s Aesthetics of Violence and Cruelty". In Lusty, N. and Walker, R. (eds) Masochism: Disciplines of Desire/Aesthetics of Cruelty/Politics of Danger (Sydney: PG ARC Publications, pp. 33-39).

Other Publications

Lusty, N. (2004). Review Essay: "Something More About Moffatt". In The Australian Financial Review, 27 February.

Lusty, N. (2002). Review Essay of Geczy, A. and Genocchio, B. (eds.) "What is Installation? An Anthology of Writings on Australian Installation Art". In Australian Humanities Review, July-August

Lusty, N. (2002). Review, "Scabs in the Cloth: Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women". In Australian Book Review, June/July

Conference Organisation

2001 Métissage: Hybrid Research in Today’s University, Convened by Professor Elizabeth Webby and Professor Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney, November (Research Assistant and Coordinator)

1998 Against the Grain: Refiguring Feminist Positions Keynote Speaker: Dr Mary Spongberg, University of Sydney (Co-convenor and organiser with Gillian Dempsey, Megan D Jones and Lise Mellor)

1997 Masochism: Disciplines of Desire/Aesthetics of Cruelty/Politics of Danger, Keynote Speaker: Dr Melissa Hardie. University of Sydney (Co-convenor and organiser with Ruth Walker and Justine McGill.)

Conference Papers

Flirting with Whiteness: Tracey Moffatt's Heaven
Masculinities: Gender, Art and Popular Culture Symposium
University of Melbourne
October 2004
http://events.unimelb.edu.au/eventid_837.html

2003 Surrealism and Its Legacies Seminar, The Modernist Studies Association Fifth Annual Conference, Birmingham, United Kingdom.

2003 Art and Fashion: Affecting Ambivalence Making an Appearance: Fashion, Dress and Consumption, University of Queensland.

2001 Cindy Sherman, Judith Butler and the Crisis of the Feminist Subject,
What’s Left of Theory? Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, University of Tasmania.

1999 Woman-Made Identity: Claude Cahun and the Poetics of Masking,
Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, University of Western Sydney.

1998 Hybrid Theories, Hybrid Forms, Border Crossings: Literature and Culture Between the Wars, SUNY, New Paltz, NY.

1997 Surrealist Haunting: A Reading of André Breton’s Nadja and Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, Literature and Psychiatry Conference. NSW’s Writer’s Centre, Rozelle.

1997 The Detached Eye: Surrealism’s Aesthetics of Violence and Cruelty, Masochism: Disciplines of Desire/Aesthetics of Cruelty/Politics of Danger Conference.

1997 Surrealist Haunting: The Canonical and Non-Canonical Text, Crossing Boundaries: English and Cultural Studies Conference, University of Melbourne.

Invited Papers and Forums

2002 (April) Invited speaker for a panel discussion on Intellectual Generosity in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. Panellists: Professor Rosemary Pringle (Southhampton), Associate-Professor Elspeth Probyn (Sydney) and Melissa Gregg (Sydney).

2002 (May) Invited Speaker for the Higher Education at the Crossroads Forum, part of the Apostasy Symposium, School of English, Art History, Film and Media, University of Sydney. Chaired by Associate Professor Deidre Coleman.

1995 The Haruspical Eye: Leonora Carrington and Georges Bataille, Invited Paper for the Women and Literature Seminar Series, Kings College, Cambridge.

1995 Work in Progress Seminar for the Women and Modernism program, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

• GCST2604 Sex, Violence and Transgression