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Dr Katherine Angel

Katherine

Senior Lecturer | Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences

Email: katherine.angel@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again book cover Katherine AngelI write literary non-fiction, and my research is in the areas of sexuality, feminism, gender, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. My first book, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell was published in 2012 by Penguin/Allen Lane. Daddy Issues was published in 2019 by Peninsula Press, and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent in 2021 by Verso. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again has been described as ‘rousing’, ‘elegant’, ‘incisive’, ‘ingenious’, and ‘ecstatic’ (Boston Review); praised for its ‘jargon-free prose and nuanced readings of popular culture and postmodern theory’, and described as a ‘lively and incisive inquiry into the sexual dynamics of the #MeToo era’ (Publishers Weekly). The Evening Standard called it ‘one of the most important books you’ll read all year’; The New Internationalist wrote that the book ‘should be required reading’, and Stylist described it as ‘one of the smartest, most nuanced and thought-provoking books in the post-Me Too era’.

My work has been translated into thirteen languages, received international coverage, and been the subject of scholarship. I have also written for the Guardian, The White Review, Granta, Aeon, Frieze, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

My first degree was in Philosophy at Cambridge University. I spent a year on a JH Choate Fellowship at Harvard University after that, and then did an MPhil and a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge University. My PhD, supervised by the late John Forrester and Peter Lipton, was on the impact of the ‘Freud wars’ and the shifts in American psychiatry in the post-war period on contemporary debates about symptom causation. Subsequently, I held a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, and a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary’s History Department, developing my research on ‘female sexual dysfunction’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. My research has been published in History of the Human Sciences, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Current Opinion in Psychiatry.

Before coming to Queen Mary in 2022, I was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, where I convened the MA in Creative and Critical Writing. Prior to that, I was a Lecturer in Kingston University’s Creative Writing Department.

I am in psychoanalytic training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

I regularly speak about and read from my work at seminars, conference, cultural venues, festivals, and broadcast media and podcasts in the UK and abroad.

Photo credit: Rebecca Tamás

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