Damon Young Promoted to Associate Professor!
Congratulations to Damon Young, who was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of French and Film & Media!
Damon teaches courses on French and francophone cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His book, Making Sex Public, and Other Cinematic Fantasies, was published by Duke University Press in December 2018 in the Theory Q series. It examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s. It also considers the way cinema produces a new model of the private self as it challenges the novel’s dominance in the twentieth century. Recent publications include: “Visage/Con: Catherine Breillat and the Antinomies of Sex” (in Qui Parle 24.2, 2016); "The Vicarious Look, or Andy Warhol's Apparatus Theory" (in Film Criticism 39.2, 2015); "Queer Seriousness" (in World Picture 9, 2014) and "The Living End, or Love Without a Future" (in Queer Love in Film and Television: Critical Essays, 2013). He is co-editor of The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism, a special issue of the journal Social Text (June 2016), which examines the relation between "formal tendencies" in art, media and film, and political economy in the 21st century.
Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Damon Young was assistant professor and postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Other honors include a DAAD fellowship (2010-11), the Norman Jacobson Memorial Teaching Award (2012) and the UC President's Society of Fellows, as well as the University of Sydney Medal. With Ramzi Fawaz, he is co-founder of the group "Sexual Politics, Sexual Poetics" (queerandnow.tumblr.com/mission).
His next book project, ‘After the Private Self’,” explores practices of self-narration and self-representation from Rousseau’s Confessions to Kim Kardashian’s Selfish.