Contact Information

Biography

Suzanne Barnard is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, filmmaker, and licensed clinical psychologist. She received her Ph. D. from Loyola University of Chicago (Clinical Psychology), and completed postdoctoral studies at Georgetown University. She is coeditor, with Bruce Fink, of Reading Lacan's Seminar XX, and has published widely on Lacanian, French feminist, and Foucauldian approaches to the body and subjectivity. She also writes in film theory (currently focused on Deleuzean approaches to cinema, affect and subjectivity), and has presented on the film work of Pedro Costa, Ben Russell, and John Akomfrah. Her research engages psychology, philosophy, film, and ethnography, and she has taught courses on Deleuze and collaborative aesthetics, on psychology, migration and "slow cinema," and on the posthuman in science fiction film.

She received a grant from Duquesne's Center for African Studies to create and teach a course on global identities and African cinema, in tandem with which she also curated an African Film Series in Spring 2015. She has been a video consultant for The REP Professional Theatre Company (Pittsburgh). Her film work has been supported by the Heinz Foundation, Binaural Media, Women and Girls Foundation, and Duquesne University. She is recently the recipient, along with Christopher McCann, of an NEH Endowment Grant for a new film project (working title: "Breath and Folding: An Ethnographic Film on Cosmologies of Air, Light, and Space).

Expertise
Philosophical Psychology : Deleuze, Foucault
Psychology, Cinema Theory, and Film Practice
Cinephilosophy
Collaborative Aesthetics and Social Engagement
Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory
French Feminism: Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous

Education

Postdoc, Philosophical Psychology, Georgetown University
Ph. D., Clinical Psychology, Loyola University of Chicago
Internship, Clinical Psychology, University of Utah

School

I am interested in film's potential to dismantle accepted notions of memory, space, place, and time, and to offer both new means for realizing relations of memory and futurity, and for constructing new subjective, social and material relations to space and place. In this context, I am also interested in the significance of the archive for the construction of subjectivities generally, but also specifically of displaced, marginalized, migratory and/or "nomadic" subjectivities in the context of globalization.

I am interested in African and African Diasporic writings, visual art and films that address questions of identity in contemporary post-colonial, de-colonial, and global contexts.

I am interested in collaborative theory/art practice in the context of ethnographic filmmaking, including sensory ethnographic work in transcultural, multicultural, diasporic, and/or "indigenous" contexts, as well as film work which collaboratively engages both human and "non-human" (e. g., built and natural environments, technologies, cosmological forces) as active participants in the creative process.

Undergraduate Courses

  • Social Psychology
  • Psychology, Identity, and film: Perspectives from African Cinema
  • Psychology of Gender

Graduate Courses

  • Philosophical Psychology

Courses in areas of research interest

  • Some Sahara in the Brain: Deleuze, Collaboration, Event
  • Psychology, Identity, and Film: Perspectives from African Cinema
  • Psychology and Film: Beyond Fiction and Documentary
  • Inner Space in Outer Space: Science Fiction Film and Posthuman Subjectivities
  • Psychology of Embodiment

(Only recent publications are listed - Publications prior to 2010 can be found here)

Barnard, S., & Borges, S. (2016). Maxamba, (documentary film). Screened in multiple international film festivals. http://www.maxamba.com.


Barnard, S. & Fink, B. (2016). The 28th lark (a short film I produced, directed, and edited).

Barnard, S. (2015). "Lacanian Psychoanalysis." In E. Neukrug (General Editor.) Encyclopedia of Theory in Counseling and Psychotherapy, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.