Jean Walton

Professor of English, Women's Studies, Film Media, and Comparative Literature

PhD State Univerity of New York, Buffalo
MA State University of New York, Buffalo
BA Simon Fraser University

Office: 208A Independence Hall
Phone: 401-874-9467
E-Mail: jwalton@uri.edu
Office Hours: Tues/Thurs 2:00 - 3:00 pm and by appointment.

Jean Walton was trained as a specialist of Modern and Postmodern literature at SUNY/Buffalo, publishing articles through the eighties and early nineties on Beckett, Nabokov, and performer Sandra Bernhard. Her interest in psychoanalytic feminist film theory and then in queer theory led her to pursue a project examining the failure of psychoanalysis to address processes of racialization, even as its most fascinating texts rely on tropes of racial "blackness" in order to make arguments about sexual or gender difference. This work culminated in a book-length study of racialized assumptions in the work of Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Marie Bonaparte, and Margaret Mead; and an article exploring similar issues in Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness.

Currently, Walton has turned to the purportedly unsavory subject of the body and its peristaltic processes, with special reference to gender, sexuality, and a Deleuzian understanding of desiring production. Her recent article in differences explores how women manage and attach significance to their bowel habits, or more generally, the movement of substances through their bodies, even as their bodies are moved through social, political, domestic, erotic, and ideological systems. Sites of investigation include psychoanalysis, industrial and domestic "time and motion" studies, and the history of "colonic health. She welcomes anecdotes about bowel rituals, especially when told with a straight face.

Before joining the faculty at URI, Walton taught at Fordham University in the Bronx (1988-92). She is the author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Duke 2001); articles on race, psychoanalysis, gender and the body in Critical Inquiry, Discourse, differences, and various edited volumes; Essays on Beckett and Nabokov in New Orleans Review, Contemporary Literature, College Literature; Co-editor Queer Utilities issue of College Literature; Recipient of Fulbright Lectureship, Moscow, 2001; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship 1997-8; URI Council for Research Grant to attend Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory, Summer 1995.

Recent courses: undergraduate and graduate theory survey courses with emphasis on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Foucault and theories of the body; Women and Literature; Gay and Lesbian Literature; Film courses such as Gender and Film, Film Theory, and Film History; Graduate seminars on The "Subject" of Poststructuralism; Fetishism, Paranoia, Melancholia; British and European Modernism and the Great War; History and Theory of the Body; Seminar in Media: Time, Motion, and the Body in Cinema.