Psyche Preborn: H.D., Embryology, Cybernetics
H.D. is known for her “hermetic,” myth-inflected poetics and her engagement with psychoanalysis, including her sessions with Freud in 1933–34. In this talk, I seek to triangulate this work against two further elements that seem to bookend her career: on the one hand, the flourishing of elite biology, and especially embryology, research at Bryn Mawr College, which H.D. briefly attended as an avowedly misfit day student from 1905 to 1907, and cybernetics, which developed during the high period of her career and was a serious point of engagement for psychoanalysts including Lacan and the Johns Hopkins-trained psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie. The interface between biology and cybernetics is well known, but it is a relationship that is often routed through a mostly-male world of foundation- and state-funded institutional science and rather less often through a feminine world of sapphic modernism. Without making overly tendentious claims for H.D.’s presence in either arena, I wish to gesture toward the difference it might make to recast this period in the history of state-funded big science through the lens of the intellectual currents and the vast supports of social reproduction that emerged in the pre-war era of the New Woman.

Wine reception in the following weeks 1, 3 and 5; Sandwiches for week 7
Date: 15 February 2024, 16:45 (Thursday, 5th week, Hilary 2024)
Venue: Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Speaker: Dr Natalia Cecire (Sussex)
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers: Dr Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford), Nicole King (University of Reading)
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu