Professor Julia Kristeva FBA talks to Professor Jacqueline Rose FBA and Professor Marian Hobson CBE FBA, about her life and work

Monday 24 May 2010, 6.30pm-8.00pm, followed by a drinks reception
The British Academy, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

Julia Kristeva, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, is a writer, psychoanalyst, a professor at the Institut Universitaire de France and a full member of the Paris Société psychoanalytique. She is a major theorist of literature, someone who could claim to have introduced a whole way of writing about literature to Western Europe (she is Bulgarian in origin). She is also an important theorist of psychoanalysis and feminism, and a novelist. Her work has been recognised by many awards: the Holberg Prize (2004), the Hannah Arendt Prize (2006), the Vaclav Havel Prize (2008) and the 2010 Prix Simone de Beauvoir.

She has also (and sometimes at the same time) been a Head of Department at Paris7, where she directs the doctoral programme 'Langue, literature, image', a member of the Economic Environmental and Social Council of France, and was recently charged by President Sarkozy with the composition of a report on 'The intercultural vocation of French as an international language: the cultural message of France'. She is the author of some thirty works including Revolution in Poetic Language, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, the trilogy Female Genius: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette (2001), Hate and Forgiveness (2010), The Incredible Need to Believe (2007), Possessions: A Novel, Murder in Byzantium, and two works soon to be published in English, Seule une femme and Thérèse mon amour (2008).

Marian Hobson is Professorial Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Jacqueline Rose is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London.

Julia Kristeva's visit was made possible by the support from the S T Lee Visiting Fellowship fund, endowed through the generosity of Dr S T Lee of Singapore.

Julia Kristeva in Conversation

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