Molly Anne Rothenberg

Professor of English

Norman Mayer 212

Telephone:  (504) 862-8166

Fax:  (504) 862-8958

E-mail:  mollyr@tulane.edu

Molly Anne Rothenberg received her doctorate from the University of California at Irvine in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory.  She is also a nationally certified practicing psychoanalyst.  Her teaching and scholarly interests include late 18th-century and 19th-century British literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, film and new media theory, social and cultural theory, and global literary studies.

She received the Tulane University Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and she has been awarded Teacher of the Year by the Honors Program.  Her latest book, The Excessive Subject:  A New Theory of Social Change (Polity 2009), uncovers an innovative theory of social change implicit in the writings of radical social theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Through case studies of these writers' work, she illuminates how this new theory calls into question currently accepted views of social practices, subject formation, democratic interaction, hegemony, political solidarity, revolutionary acts, and the ethics of alterity.

Her current research project, "Against Diaspora:  Working Class Migration and the Unsettling of Race," investigates how early 19th-century literature incorporates an emergent transatlantic street culture to counter anxieties about migratory labor, a process that opens up new possibilities for identifications across race and class, implicitly challenging the race-in-place discourse that underwrites later Victorian ideologies of empire.   

She is the co-editor with Jamil Khader of the forthcoming volume Zizek Now! (Polity 2011).  Her other books include Re-Thinking Blake's Textuality and SIC IV:  Perversion and the Social Relation, edited with Dennis Foster and Slavoj Zizek.  She has published in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, English Language Notes, and The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, among others.