Joan Copjec

Joan Karen Copjec (born 1946) is an American philosopher, theorist, author, feminist, and prominent Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist. She is Professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University.

Early life and career Joan K. Copjec was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1946; her family is of Czech ancestry. She received her bachelor's degree in English literature, with a minor in Classics, in 1968 from Wheaton College. She received her master's degree in English in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her doctoral work there, with a minor in Film in 1972. Abandoning her original Ph.D. dissertation project, she continued pursuing her film interests from 1972–74 at the Orson Welles Film School, an operation of the Orson Welles Cinema, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978, she received a two-year graduate diploma from the Film Unit of the Slade School of Fine Arts at University College, London. In 1986, she completed her Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University.

Prior to beginning her position at Brown University in 2013, she was a visiting associate professor in English, an associated professor in Cinema and Media Studies, and a Distinguished Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, all at the State University of New York University at Buffalo, from 1989 to 2013. From 1991 to 2013, she also served as the Director of the Center for Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, also at Buffalo. She has served as editor or co-editor for several academic journals and book series, including October (1981–1992) and Umbr(a), which she co-founded.

In that same set of interviews, she marks her psychoanalytic position as distinct from the premises of what she considers "gender theory": Much of my current work is focused on salvaging sex and sexual difference (as they are understood by Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis) from the threat of extinction. This has me to try to rearticulate a robust notion of "group psychology" or "community" and to oppose what is called "gender theory," a phenomenon that emerged in the 80s not only in the West but also in the Islamic world and that sets as its goal the elimination of sexual difference.

Selected bibliography Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2002) Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (MIT Press, 1994) Supposing the Subject (Verso, 1994)