Joan Copjec is a Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her research concerns the status of sexual difference as a primary (or ontological) rather than a secondary (or ontic) category. Copjec believes that psychoanalysis, as inheritor of German Idealism, provides the only real theory of this category, as she has stated in her books, including the most recent, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2002). Copjec was a fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York; taught architecture and film theory at a variety of architecture schools; and was a long-time editor of the influential art journal, October, and of a book series, S, at Verso Press. But it was psychoanalytic theory to which she devoted most of her attention over the last two decades, serving as director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo and publishing the journal Umbr(a), which she founded in 1995 with her graduate students there. Her most recent work, which is focused on the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker, and medieval Islamic philosophy, will be published in her next book, tentatively titled Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran.
