Katharine Conley

Professor Conley's research and teaching focuses on surrealism as the premier avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. She has published books and articles on women and the surrealist movement, on the poet Robert Desnos as the founding figure upon whom surrealist practice was founded — a poet whose surrealist idealism helped him in his work on the radio in the 1930s and in the French Resistance up through his deportation and death in a newly liberated concentration camp in 1945 — and on the links between surrealist poetry and painting and surrealism and outsider art. She is also the author of essays in museum exhibition catalogues. She teaches courses in the Department of French and Italian and in the Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies Programs on surrealism, women in surrealism, modernism and anthropology, primitivism and outsider art, and on surrealism and photography. Her current research project explores ghostliness in surrealist thought, film, photography, painting, sculpture, and writing.