Members

Board of Directors

Clint Burnham (President) is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. He writes on contemporary art and culture in such venues as artforum.com (NYC), Artpapers (Atlanta), Camera Austria (Vienna), and fillip (Vancouver). He is also the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction, including most recently Rental Van (2007) and Smoke Show (2005). His book The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory was published in 1995 by Duke University Press. He is currently working on two book-length projects: a study of the Vancouver-based poetry collective the Kootenay School of Writing, to be published next year by ELS press in Victoria, and a study of the work of Slavoj Žižek. His research and intellectual interests lie in the nexus of cultural studies, popular culture, avant-garde writing, and psychoanalytic and Marxist theory.

Paul Kingsbury (Vice President) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Specializing in social and cultural geography, his research draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche to examine multiculturalism, consumption, power, and aesthetics. He has been a member of the Salon since 2007.

Hilda Fernandez (Clinical Director) is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and co-founder of the Lacan Salon. She currently works as a psychoanalyst in private practice and as a therapist for Vancouver Coastal Health, working with populations touched by suicide. She has an MA in Clinical Psychology (UNAM), an MA in Spanish Literature (UBC) and more than 15 years of Lacanian training. She was the president of the Western Canada Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy Association (WCPPA) from 2005-2007 and currently is an Associate with SFU Institute for the Humanities. She is originally from Mexico, passionate about the transmission of psychoanalysis, and committed to building community. (www.hildafernandez.com)

Alessandra Capperdoni (Director) is a graduate in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the Università degli Studi di Bologna (Bologna, Italy). In 2006, she obtained her Ph.D. in English at Simon Fraser University, B.C., where she is presently teaching courses on literature and critical theory in the Departments of English and Humanities. Her work on feminism and psychoanalysis is conjoined with theories of affect. Her research on modernist and postmodern experimental writings and feminist poetics focuses on female subjectivity, feminine sexuality, love, and desire in relation to larger social practices and formations (national imaginaries, transculturalism, global relations, and social change). She has been a member of the Salon since 2008.

Christopher Dzierzawa (Director) holds a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of British Columbia. Currently he is pursuing a Masters in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School and a professional degree in Clinical Counselling from the Vancouver College of Counsellor Training. Interests include logic, language, feminism, and mental health. He has been a member of the Salon since 2008.

Ted Byrne (Treasurer) is a labour researcher. He is a Director of the Trade Union Research Bureau in Vancouver. He studied Lacan with Anthony Wilden at SFU in the 1970s, with emphasis on the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. He returned to Lacan in the 80s as a graduate student in Comparative Literature, with particular reference to feminist film studies, where the emphasis was on Seminar XX (Encore). He has a long association with the Kootenay School of Writing. His most recent literary publications are Beautiful Lies (Capilano University Press) and Sonnets : Louise Labé (Nomados Literary Publishers).

Alma Krilic (Secretary) is a teacher and student at Simon Fraser University.

Current Members

Marc Acherman is a PhD candidate in the English department at Simon Fraser University. He works on post-war American fiction and mass culture. His dissertation focuses on narratives of terror and terrorism following 9/11 as seen through a Marxist-psychoanalytic lens.

Dan Adleman is a UBC English PhD candidate interested in contemporary American literature, psychoanalysis, new media studies, and biopolitics. This 2013 he is organizing VISR, a 9-week critical theory free school at the Or Gallery in downtown Vancouver.

Kyle Carpenter is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University, in the department of English. His studies are an application of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory to posthuman studies and the digital humanities.

Glenn Deefholts teaches in the English Department at Langara College. His BA and MA are in English from SFU.

Dave Gaertner is studying English in the PhD program at Simon Fraser University. His dissertation is on discourses of reconciliation in Canadian literature. He is currently interested in how forgiveness can be articulated in Lacanian thought and how this inflects our understanding if the Judeo/Christian tradition of reconciliation. He has been a part of the Lacan Salon since the fall of 2008.

Dr. Nancy Gillespie completed her PhD thesis on The Ecstatic Woman and the Grotesque: A New Lacanian Subject in the work of Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy in July of 2008 at the University of Sussex, UK. As a Canadian, she was the grateful recipient of a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholarship and a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Doctoral Fellowship to pursue her research abroad. She is currently working on two books: a revision of her thesis, and an edited collection, entitled Gothic Remains: Symptoms of the Modern for Manchester University Press. She has been a colleague of the London Society of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis for six years, and will soon be pursuing a training analysis in Paris. She has been a member of the Lacan Salon since its inception. During her research for her Doctorate, she was the Coordinator of the Centre for Modernist Studies at The University of Sussex for four years and taught as an Associate at Sussex. She is on the Executive of the International Gothic Association. As a member of the KSW Writers’ Collective, she is convening a Poetry Reading and Critical Workshop series, entitled Negotiating the social bond of poetics, which is based on Lacan’s four discourses.

Dr. Larry Green is a practicing psychotherapist with over 42 years experience. He finds that Lacan’s three registers—the imaginary, the symbolic and the real—to be an excellent framework for understanding the mixed levels that generate behaviour. His dissertation examined the relationship between the prereflective self and the reflective mind—therapy as the process of connecting heart and mind. As an artist he is also interested in how both individual and collective development depend upon the forging of symbols that allow us to see and potentially critique what previously existed but was unrecognized.

Desiree Jung was born in Brazil and her background includes Journalism and Filmmaking. Since moving to Vancouver in 1998, she has studied at the Vancouver Film School and UBC, where she obtained her BFA and MFA in Creative Writing. Her major fields of work are translation (most recently, My Dear Cannibal, by Antonio Torres) and poetry (work published in Canada, Brazil, and Europe). She holds a Ph.D. from UBC's Department of Comparative Literature; her dissertation concerned the book Brazilian Journal, by the Canadian poet P. K. Page focussing on its relationship to embodiment, phenomenology, sensuality, and the naming of Brazil. Her website is www.desireejung.com

Matea Kulic Matea Kulić is a writer and teacher based in Vancouver, BC. Since graduating from Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio, she has been engaged in various projects from translation and academic writing to literary, experimental and collaborative works. The use of fragments/segments/broken lines in her prose interrogates identity as stable and whole. Her writing appears in The Capilano Review, RicePaper, In/Words Magazine, Emerge, The Maynard Review (among others) has been performed in collaboration with ArtSongLab. She has been a member of the Lacan Salon since 2012 and in 2015 presented a paper for the Conversations with Lacan on Feminine Sexuality Panel.

Mel Maxon: Areas of interest Lacan and poetics.

Paulina Moreno has a five year Career undergraduate degree in Clinical Psychology from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador including a year of research focused on psychoanalysis and cinema. She continued her post-graduate studies in Clinical Work for Addictions at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has undergone eight years of Lacanian psychoanalytical training and is an active contributing member of the Addiction Research Module program at the Descartes Centre, Buenos Aires associated with the Institute of the Freudian Field. Holds a M.Ed. degree in Society, Culture and Politics in Education from the University of British Columbia where she focused her research on the neo-liberal capitalist context of addictions, discourse, and power. Experience working as a therapist in public institutions and in private practice. Experience as a Lacanian psychoanalyst under supervision. Has been a member of the Salon since 2007.

Bradley Murray works as a psychotherapist in private practice in Vancouver and teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His current research concerns issues at the intersection of Kant's aesthetics, anthropology, and moral psychology, as well as philosophical issues relating to Freudian theory.

Nazanin Naraghi is a filmmaker and a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Her doctoral dissertation research is concerned with film, vision and the Lacanian notion of the gaze within the context of Post-Revolution Iranian subjectivity. She is especially interested in the work of Forough Farrokhzad, Georges Bataille, and the emergence of a ‘New’ Lacanian film theory.

Calen Nixon will graduate with a bachelor's degree, Philosophy major Literature minor, from UBC in May 2009. His diverse interests include architecture, theory and translation, and, more recently, history and psychology. He has written on British Columbia cinema for Cinephile, UBC's Graduate Film Studies journal. He plans to begin architecture school in September 2010. In the meantime, he lives and labours in the dynamic Vancouver restaurant industry, prioritizing environmental concern as management practice. His next paper focuses on how the phenomenon "deconstruction" is impossible to analyze in psychological or historical frameworks alone.

Janet Oakes, BC-ATP, M.A.(cand.), F.I.P.A. is an Internationally Certified Psychoanalyst with twenty plus years of experience working in the mental health field in private, public and non-profit agencies. Currently she has a private practice in Vancouver providing Psychoanalytic Services, Art Therapy and Clinical Supervision. She is an active member of the Western Branch of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, teaching in the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program and has presented at Annual Conferences with Donna Orange Making Sense Together: Intersubjectivity in Clinical Practice Oct. 26-27 – 2001, James Grotstein, MD Impediments to Love, Mar. 24- ,25 – 2006 and Franco Borgogno Firenze’s turn in Psychoanalysis Mar. 2007. Janet is a member in of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and International Psychoanalytic Association. She has been a member of the Lacan Salon since 2008. www.janetoakes.com

Jesse Proudfoot is a postdoctoral researcher at DePaul University in Chicago. A geographer by training (Simon Fraser University, 2011), his Ph.D. research used Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine the fraught spaces of drug use and panhandling in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, the politics of harm reduction drug policy and social anxieties about drug users and panhandlers. Now in Chicago he continues this work on drug use and drug policy, as well as using psychoanalysis to theorize addiction more broadly and the question of reflexivity in ethnographic fieldwork. He is currently pursuing his own analysis and is a fellow of the Chicago Centre for Psychoanalysis. He was an active member of the Lacan Salon from its inception in 2007 until his departure for Chicago in 2011.

Veda Roodal Persad teaches in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Langara College.

Ofelia Ros is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. She has a MA in Clinical Psychology at the University of Uruguay and six years of Lacanian guidance at the Escuela Freudiana de Montevideo, lacanian analyzed and supervised at the same institution. She is now finishing her doctoral thesis, centered at the intersection of Argentinean literature and psychoanalysis. Essentially working to undermine “ideological fantasies” of domination, it relies primarily on parodic forms of defamiliarization that resemble Freud’s definition of the uncanny (Das Unheimliche): that is, stressing what is unknown and threatening at the very site of the familiar or “heimlich.”

Jorge Santiago Zepeda is an analyst, and co-founder and active member of the psychoanalytical non-profit organization Grupo Metonimia A.C. in Chiapas, Mexico. He holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology (Chiapas University of Sciences and Arts, Mexico), an MA in Psychoanalytical Theory (Centre for Psychoanalytical Research and Studies, Mexico), and an MA in Critical Theory (17, Critical Studies Institute, Mexico). He is currently a student in a certificate programme in substance use (Justice Institute of B.C.). With over nine years of Lacanian training, in recent years he has also had an analytical private practice. He has been a member of the Salon since September, 2010.

Leah Sharzer is originally from Vancouver, but has been studying and working in Paris for the past 6 years. She has just completed an undergraduate degree in French Literature at Université Paris 8, mostly focusing on the changes in literature, language and culture at the beginning of Modernism. She is currently writing and studying poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio program. She has been a member of the Lacan Salon since January 2015.

Jon Smith is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, where he specializes in post-1900 U.S. literatures and cultures, particularly those of the U.S. South. His current research draws on Lacan and Žižek to understand melancholy, especially as it organizes the enjoyment of country music listeners, Gen Xers, traditional scholars of the U.S. South, and the Tea Party/Sarah Palin/conservative evangelical nexus. Except for two semesters away doing fieldwork in Alabama, he has been a regular member of the Salon since 2009.

Dan Starling is an artist from Vancouver. Having studied at the University of British Columbia, he went on to complete a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2005) and a Meisterschüler from the Städelschule, Frankfurt (2011). www.danstarling.com

Jason Starnes is a PhD candidate in the English Department at SFU. He is interested in representations of space in post-war American poetry, and Lacanian topologies in the politics of globalization.

Myka Tucker-Abramson is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University. Her work examines neoliberalism and US literature through the Freudian theory of Shock.

Wayne Wapeemukwa graduated with a philosophy degree from the University of British Columbia in 2013; when not arguing he is a filmaker who reads Lacan.

Members of the Lacan Salon are participants who have attended at least one term.