Dr Francesca Lewis
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

I joined the Centre for Women's Studies as a Lecturer in 2023, after completing my PhD there. I previously gained my BA in English Literature & Creative Writing at Edge Hill University, before going on to pursue a Masters in Interdisciplinary Psychology at Leeds Beckett. I've taught in English as well as in Sociology. My work is highly interdisciplinary, combining my background in literary and film analysis, psychoanalysis and social psychology, queer/feminist and disability studies.

My specialisms include critical medical humanities; feminist new materialisms; affect theory; autotheory and situated knowledges; queer phenomenology; theories of ontology and ipseity; TV & film, particularly speculative genres, metamodernism and representations of madness; and neuroqueer approaches to madness.

I was Research Project Co-ordinator on the Violence Elsewhere Research Project (PIs: Dr Clare Bielby and Dr Mererid Puw Davies).

I am co-founder (with Veronica Heney) of the Mad Feeling Collective, an interdisciplinary research collective which brings lived experience and affect-led approaches to explorations of madness on TV.

I am a mentor in the Neurodivergent Humanities Network.

I have been published by the Journal of Psychosocial Studies. My chapter for the Violence Elsewhere 2 edited volume is due for publication in 2024. I have written for Durham’s Medical Humanities platform 'The Polyphony' on new materialism and TV, and on the value of neuroqueer knowledges in the medical humanities.

Research

Overview

In my doctoral research, I focused on borderline experience, known clinically as borderline personality disorder. The study is an exploration of borderline onto-epistemology from a feminist neuroqueer materialist perspective. It focuses on dissociative experiences of self and identity in borderline experience, rather than the more commonly studied interpersonal and emotional aspects of BPD.

I worked with and advocated for the use of neuroqueer and feminist new materialist (Barad, Braidotti) approaches to expand existing pathologizing and stigmatizing understandings of borderline experience. My aim was to show how borderline knowledges might instead be valued as challenges to the very binary and Cartesian notions that underpin the Enlightenment ideals of psychoanalytic discourse. Using Karen Barad’s diffractive reading, I considered the borderline experiences of uncategorisability, indeterminacy and unreality through televisual and literary texts. I worked with an eclectic textual corpus, including the Netflix series Russian Doll, and the work of 20th century Latin American writers Alejandra Pizarnik and Clarice Lispector.

This was the first in-depth philosophical study of BPD written from a situated neuroqueer materialist positionality, and as such presents the borderline as a valuable site of onto-epistemological possibility, while offering a unique and accessible methodological approach to neuroqueer knowledges.

Publications

Selected publications

• “Reflection/Diffraction: Russian Doll (2019) and the Phenomenology of Being Borderline”, The Polyphony, March 2020.
• “The Borderline as Diagnostician: an autø/gnøstic reading of a history of binaries”, Journal of Psychosocial Studies (2023).
• “The Entangled Mess of the Embodied Elsewhere in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018)”, Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany Since 2001 (edited volume, forthcoming with Camden House, 2024).
• “The Kaleidoscopic Value of Neuroqueer Knowledges”, The Polyphony, July 2023.