Downing's work is innovative in its dialogue between the critical humanities and the sciences, especially psychiatry. Her published work focuses principally on theories of sexual perversion and queer theory; the work of Michel Foucault; ethical philosophy and film; and, most recently, the cultural meanings of criminality.
Background and career
Downing trained in Modern European Languages and Literatures at the Universities of London and Oxford. She took up a Lectureship at Queen Mary, University of London in 1999, where she was promoted to Reader in 2005. She was appointed to a chair at the University of Exeter in 2006, at the age of 31.[2] In 2012, Downing moved to an established chair at the University of Birmingham.
She is one of co-organisers of the interdisciplinary seminar series "Critical Sexology".
Awards
Downing received a 2009 Philip Leverhulme Prize, a prize "awarded to outstanding scholars under the age of 36 who have made a substantial contribution to their field of study, are recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise."[3]
Works
Books as author
Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford, EHRC, 2003)
Patrice Leconte (French Film Directors Series; Manchester University Press, 2004)
The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (co-authored with Libby Saxton; Routledge, 2009)
The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (Chicago University Press, 2013)[4]
Fuckology (Chicago University Press, 2014) co-authored with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, a critical analysis of the legacy of psychologist and sexologistJohn Money.[5]New Scientist described the book as "ably capturing" Money's story[6] while Susan Stryker described the book as a "careful, critical and nuanced" analysis of Money's career.[5]
Books as editor
Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (with Sarah Capitanio, Paul Rowe and Nick White; Peter Lang, 2005)
