A complete list of Lisa’s published academic works follows.
A full academic CV can also be downloaded here.
AUTHORED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa, Selfish Women, 2nd expanded edition with a new Preface and Afterword (Abingdon: Routledge, in preparation; forthcoming: 2027).
Downing, Lisa, Against Affect, Provocations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming: 2026).
Downing, Lisa, Selfish Women (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
Downing, Lisa, Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan (co-authored), Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Downing, Lisa, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). [For a feature on The Subject of Murder in the Times Higher Education, see here.]
Downing, Lisa and Libby Saxton (co-authored), Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
Downing, Lisa, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) (Persian translation published in 2019).
Downing, Lisa, Patrice Leconte French Film Directors Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
Downing, Lisa, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature, Legenda (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2003).
EDITED BOOKS
Downing, Lisa (ed.), Critical Freedoms (Special Issue of Paragraph published simultaneously as a stand-alone book by Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
Downing, Lisa, (ed.), After Foucault: Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Downing, Lisa and Lara Cox (eds), Queering The Second Wave (Special Issue of Paragraph published simultaneously as a stand-alone book by Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, now Routledge, 2011) (Translation into Croatian as Queer u Europi by Zagreb: Zagreb Pride, in 2013).
Downing, Lisa and Sue Harris (eds), From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007; reprinted, 2011).
Nobus, Dany and Lisa Downing (eds), Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Karnac Books, now Routledge, 2006).
EDITED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Harkness, Nigel, Lisa Downing, Sonya Stephens and Tim Unwin (eds), Birth and Death: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ‘Faux titres’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
Capitanio, Sarah, Lisa Downing, Paul Rowe and Nick White (eds), Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).
GUEST-EDITED SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS
Downing, Lisa (ed.), Special Issue of Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory on ‘Critical Freedoms’, 46:3, 2023.
Downing, Lisa and Lara Cox (eds.), Special Issue of Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory on ‘Queering the Second Wave’, 41:3, 2018.
Downing, Lisa (ed.), Special Issue of Psychology and Sexuality on ‘Sex Blogging’, 3:1, 2012.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett (eds), Special Issue of Sexualities on ‘European Culture/ European Queer’, 15:1, 2012.
Cryle, Peter and Lisa Downing (eds), Special Issue of Psychology and Sexuality on ‘Nature and Normality in the History of Sexuality’, 1:3, 2010.
Cryle, Peter and Lisa Downing (eds), Special Issue of Journal of the History of Sexuality, on ‘Feminine Sexual Pathologies in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Europe’, 18:1, 2009.
ARTICLES IN REFEREED JOURNALS
Downing, Lisa, ‘Revisiting the Abject Phallus in a Post-#Metoo/ #BalanceTonPorc World’, Nottingham French Studies, Special Commemorative Issue on ‘Essays in Memory of Keith Reader’, ed. Alex Hughes, Jeremy Lane and Bill Marshall, 64:2, 2025, 109-122.
Downing, Lisa, ‘On Refusing to Care as a Feminist Ethic: A Response to “Reactionary Feminists” Louise Perry and Mary Harrington’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Special Issue on ‘Cultures of Care in the 21st Century’ ed. Jasmine Cooper and Katie Pleming, 48:2, 2025, 151-167.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Author Functions and Freedom: “Michel Foucault” and “Ayn Rand” in the Anglophone “Culture Wars”’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Special Issue on ‘Critical Freedoms’, ed. Lisa Downing 46:3, 2023, 301-316.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Im/mobility’, différences, Special Commemorative Issue on ‘Syntax of Thought: Reading Bersani’, ed. Jacques Khalip and John Ricco 34:1, 2023, 150-155.
Downing, Lisa, ‘“(S)extremism”: Imagining Violent Women in the Twenty-First Century with Navine G. Khan-Dossos and Julia Kristeva’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 43:2, 2020, 212-229.
Downing, Lisa, ‘The Body Politic: Gender, The Right Wing, and “Identity Category Violations”’, French Cultural Studies, 29:4, 2018, 367-377.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Antisocial Feminism? Monique Wittig, Shulamith Firestone, and Proto-Antisocial Queer’, Paragraph: Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Special Issue on ‘Queering the Second Wave’, ed. Lisa Downing and Lara Cox, 41:3, 2018, 364-379.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Dying for Sex: Cultural and Forensic Narratives of Autoerotic Death’, New Formations, Special Double Issue on ‘Death and the Contemporary’, ed. Georgina Colby, 89-90, 2017, 137-152.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological “Perversion Theory” and the DSM-5‘s “Paraphilic Disorder” Diagnoses’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44:4, 2015, 1139-1145.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Safewording!: Kinkphobia and Gender Normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey’, Psychology and Sexuality, 4:1, 2013, 92-102.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Gendered Constructions of the Nightmare in French Nineteenth-Century Medical Writing and Fantastic Fiction’, French Studies, 66:3, 2012, 331-346.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, Queer: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Contentions in France’, Paragraph, Special Issue on ‘Queer Theory’s Return to France’, ed. Oliver Davis and Hector Kolias, 35: 2, 2012, 215-232.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Notes on a Proto-Queer Rachilde: Decadence, Deviance and (Reverse) Discourse in La Marquise de Sade’, Sexualities, Special Issue on ‘European Culture/ European Queer’, ed. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, 15:1, 2012,16-27.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Reading Bitchy Jones’s Diary: Sex-Blogging, Community-Building and Feminism(s)’, Psychology and Sexuality, Introduction to a Special Section of a Special Issue on ‘Sex Blogging’, 3:1, 2012, 5-11.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, ‘Georges Bataille at the Avant-garde of Queer Theory?: Trangression, Perversion and Death Drive’, Nottingham French Studies, Special Issue on ‘The French Avant-garde’, ed. Stephen Forcer and Emma Wagstaff, 50:3, 2011, 86-100.
Downing, Lisa, ‘On the Fantasy of Childlessness as Death in Psychoanalysis and in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and von Trier’s Antichrist’, Lambda Nordica, 2:3, 2011, 49-68.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, ‘Viewing Critical Psychology through the Lens of Queer’, Psychology and Sexuality, Special Issue on ‘Queer(y)ing Psychology’, ed. Peter Hegarty, 2:1, 2011, 4-15.
Gillett, Robert and Lisa Downing, ‘The Translation of Deployment/ The Deployment of Translation: The dispositif in Foucault, his Exegetes and his Translators’, In Other Words: The Journal for Literary Translators, Special Issue on ‘Translating Queers/ Queering Translation’, ed. B. J. Epstein, No. 36, 2010, 40-53.
Downing, Lisa, ‘John Money’s “Normophilia”: Diagnosing Sexual Normality in Late-Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Sexology’, Psychology and Sexuality, Special Issue on ‘The Natural and The Normal in the History of Sexuality’ ed. Peter Cryle and Lisa Downing, 1:3, 2010, 275-87.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Murder in the Feminine: Madame Lafarge and the Sexualization of the Nineteenth-Century Criminal Woman’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, Special Issue on ‘Feminine Sexual Pathologies’ ed. Peter Cryle and Lisa Downing, 18:1, 2009, 121-37.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Reviewing the Sexual Relation: Levinas and Film’, Film-Philosophy, Special Issue on ‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’, ed. Sarah Cooper, 11:2, 2007, 49-65.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Baise-moi or the Ethics of the Desiring Gaze’, Nottingham French Studies, special issue on ‘Focalizing the Body: Recent Women’s Writing and Filmmaking in France’ ed. Gill Rye and Carrie Tarr, 45:3, 2006, 52-65.
Downing, Lisa, ‘The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud’, Dix-Neuf, Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, no. 5, 2005, 28-46.
Downing, Lisa and Dany Nobus (co-authored ), ‘The Iconography of Asphyxiophilia: From Fantasmatic Fetish to Forensic Fact’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, 27:3, 2004, 1-15.
Downing, Lisa, ‘French Cinema’s New Sexual Revolution: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre’, French Cultural Studies , Special Issue on ‘New Directions in French Cinema’ ed. Sue Harris, 15:3, 2004, 265-80.
Downing, Lisa, ‘The Measure of Sexual Dysfunction: A Plea for Theoretical Limitlessness’, Transformations: Region, Culture, Society, special issue on ‘Regions of Sexuality’, ed. Iain Morland and Wendy O’Brien no. 8, 2004.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Aesthetic Violence and Motiveless Murder in French Decadent Fiction’, French Studies, 58:2, 2004, 189-204.
Downing, Lisa, ‘On the Limits of Sexual Ethics: The Phenomenology of Autassassinophilia’, Sexuality and Culture, 8:1, 2004, 3-17.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in Female-Authored Textual Production’, French Cultural Studies, 14:2, 2003, 157-168.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Between Men and Women; Beyond Heterosexuality: Limits and Possibilities of the Erotic in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed and Patrice Leconte’s La Fille sur le pont’, Romance Studies, University of Swansea, 20:1, 2002, 29-40.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Feminist Fictions of the Flesh (?): Alina Reyes’s Le Boucher and Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade’, Journal of Romance Studies, 2:1, 2002, 51-64.
BOOK CHAPTERS
Downing, Lisa, ‘Selfish Cinema: Sex, Heroism, and Control in Adaptations of Ayn Rand for the Screen’ in Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts, ed. Neil Cocks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 109-129.
Downing, Lisa, untitled contribution to Feminism in Our Times: Crises, Connections and Cares, ed. Yvette Taylor (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Open Access publishing, 2020), 29.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Foucault and True Crime’ in After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Lisa Downing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 185-200.
Downing, Lisa, ‘“Straight” Necrophilia as a “Queer” Perversion in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed’, in Tainted Love; Screening Sexual Perversities, ed. Darren Kerr and Donna Perbedy (London: I B Tauris, 2017), 24-34.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity’ in Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (New York: Punctum, 2017), 105-126.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Where’s Girlhood? The Female Child Killer and Tony Hickson’s Where’s Mary? (2005)’, in International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts, ed. Fiona Handyside and Kate E. Taylor-Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153-163.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Snuff and Nonsense: The Discursive Life of an Imaginary Archive’, in Porn Archives, ed. Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky & David Squires (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 249-261.
Downing Lisa, ‘On “Compulsory Sexuality”, Sexualization, and History’, Commissioned Afterword for The Routledge History of Sex and the Body in the West, 1500 to the Present, ed Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 527-533.
Downing, Lisa ‘Sexual Perversion as Textual Resistance in the Writing of Rachilde and Monique Wittig’ in Modernist Eroticisms: European Literature after Sexology, ed. Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 195-212.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology’ in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 201-220.
Downing, Lisa,’Sexual Variations’ in Sexuality in the Age of Empire (1820-1920), ed. Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier, vol. 5 of A Cultural History of Sexuality, 6 vols., general ed. Julie Peakman (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 63-81.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Criminality, Sexuality, Abnormality: Nineteenth-Century Scientific Constructions’ in New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film, ed. Louise Hardwick, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 19-33.
Downing, Lisa,‘Beyond Safety: Erotic Asphyxiation and the Limits of S/M Discourse’ in Safe, Sane and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism, ed. Darren Langridge and Meg Barker (Palgrave, 2007), 119-32.
Downing, Lisa,’Polanski’s Deneuve: Frigidity and Feminism’ in From Perversion to Purity: The Stardom of Catherine Deneuve, edited Lisa Downing and Sue Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 14-28.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Perversion, Historicity, Ethics’ in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives/ Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, edited Dany Nobus and Lisa Downing (London and New York: Karnac Books, now Routledge, 2006), 149-163.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Ecstasies and Agonies: The “Oceanic Feeling”, God and Sexuality in Baudelaire and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’ in (Un)Faithful Texts: Religion in French and Francophone Literature from the 1780s to the 1980s, ed. Paul Cooke and Jane Lee (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2000) 53-66.
REVIEW ARTICLES (OVER 1000 WORDS – A SELECTION)
Downing, Lisa, Review of Sandra Boehringer and Daniele Lorenzini (eds.) Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2024, 33:2, 289-291.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Alison Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2016), in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2017, 26:3, 534-536.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Power for Pleasure: Review of Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011)’ in New Formations, 2013, 80-81, 218-220.
Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, Review of Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska (eds), De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives (Farnham: Ashgate: 2011) in Psychology and Sexuality, 4:3, 2013, 325-328.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford (eds), Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) in Studies in the Maternal, 4:1, 2012.
Downing, Lisa, ‘Object-Become-Subject: When Femmes Look Back: Review of Del LaGrace Volcano and Ulrika Dahl, Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2008)’ in SQS – Journal of Queer Studies in Finland, 5:1, 2011, 63-65.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Rothenberg, Foster and Zizek (eds), Perversion and the Social Relation (Duke University Press, 2003) in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 36:1, 2007,127-28.
Downing, Lisa, Review of Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago University Press, 2000) in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 34: 2, 2005, 255-57.
JOURNAL EDITORIAL/ ADVISORY BOARD SERVICE
* Editor of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, the leading UK journal of Modern Critical Theory, published by Edinburgh University Press (chief editor 2024-2026).
* Member of the Editorial Board of INSEP: Journal of the International Network of Sexual Ethics and Politics, published by Budrich.
* Member of the Editorial Board of Screen Bodies, published by Berghahn.
* Former Member of the Advisory Board of Psychology and Sexuality, published by Taylor & Francis (as a non-psychologist offering a theoretical arts and humanities perspective on sexuality studies, from 2010-2015).