Rate My Professor Sigi Jottkandt

Sigi Jottkandt is Associate Professor in English at the School of the Arts and Media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. She holds a BA from the University of Auckland (1988), an MA from the University of Melbourne (1992), and a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2002), where her dissertation committee included Henry Sussman, Joan Copjec, and Rodolphe Gasché. Her research specializations encompass 19th and 20th century British and American literature, with a particular focus on Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, alongside Lacanian psychoanalysis, Continental philosophy, aesthetics, digital humanities, and open access publishing. In 2008, she co-founded the international open access publishing collective Open Humanities Press, which she directs and chairs its Editorial Oversight Group. That same year, she co-founded the flagship journal of the Netherlands-based Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, and previously co-founded the journal Umbr(a): a journal of the unconscious. She serves on several editorial boards of professional journals and was a member of the Scientific Board of the European Commission-funded Open Access Publishing in European Networks project.

Jottkandt's key publications include the monograph The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (Open Humanities Press, 2024), which explores the future of reading as reverse interpretation; Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY Press, 2005); and First Love: A Phenomenology of the One: Beckett, Turgenev, Clare, Welty, Kierkegaard (re.press, 2010). She has edited collections such as Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales (Open Humanities Press, 2024, with Prudence Gibson et al.), Penumbra: Counter-memories of the Present (re.press, 2013, with Joan Copjec), and The Catastrophic Imperative: Time, Subjectivity, Memory in Contemporary Thought (Palgrave, 2009, with Dominiek Hoens and Gert Buelens). Other notable works include chapters like 'Modern Love Theory' in Understanding Modernism, Understanding Badiou (Bloomsbury, 2024) and articles such as 'History's Hard Sign: Vladimir Nabokov's The Visit to the Museum' in S: Journal (2020). In 2014, she received UNSW's Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence. She collaborates on an ARC Linkage grant investigating the aesthetic value of Australian herbaria and has delivered public lectures at venues including the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, MaMa Institute in Zagreb, and IIT Gandhinagar. She teaches across the English program, integrating visual texts into literary theory discussions.