Welcoming Dr. Derek Hook of Duquesne University

Monday, Feb. 6, 2-3:30 p.m.
Student Center 160

Dr. Hook explores “Fanon and Phenomenology and The Topic of Racial Ontologizing Through the Body.” Sponsored by the Psychology and Philosophy Departments.

Derek Hook is a scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory (the work of Frantz Fanon in particular), the psychology of racism and critical social psychology. Current projects include the development of two manuscripts to be published by Routledge's Psychology Press, the first, with Sheldon George, is titled Lacan and Race; the second, with Leswin Laubscher and Miraj Desai, is entitled Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology. His applied (socio-political) research tends to focus on the various psychical modalities of racism, often in the contexts of American and South African culture. He is particularly interested in a psychoanalytic tracing of the various affective/psychical dimensions of race and racism, as exemplified in recent publications focusing on topics such as: white anxiety, petrified life, the temporality of racism in Fanon, death-bound subjectivity and Fanon's zone of non-being, the death-drive in culture, and racist and racializing embodiment.

In addition to his Duquesne University appointment, Derek is an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria and South Africa. He teaches an annual summer class on Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College at the University of London. He was the recipient of International Social Research Foundation grant in 2015. He has twice been awarded a Loogman Grant from the Center for African Studies at Duquesne University (for research on the anti-apartheid Africanist intellectual and political leader Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe), and he received the McAnulty College Award for excellence in research in 2016.