Dr Alison Moore

• Biography 
• Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise
• Grants / Current Projects
• Awards 
• Publications
• Membership / Engagement
• Contact
  

Biography

Alison Moore is an intellectual and cultural historian of late modern Europe. She has previously held positions at the University of Sydney (History), the University of Wollongong (Modern Languages), the University of Technology Sydney (International Studies) and at the University of Queensland (Centre for the History of European Discourses). Her expertise is in the history of France and Germany of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and medicine, the history of sexuality and of excretion, World War II memory studies, and historiographic theory. Her ongoing work focuses on the history of cultural historians in Europe, on the emergence of the concept of 'interdisciplinarity', and on the history and epistemology of knowledge styles conceived divergently as the sciences or as the humanities.

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Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise

Modern European intellectual history
French and German cultural history
History of Sexuality
Historiographic Theory
History of humanities and of interdisciplinarity

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Grants / Current Projects

Sexual Myths of Modernity –  A sole-authored study of various teleological accounts of sexual perversions as barbaric and decadent, and a history of the ideas of sadism and masochism from 1849-2010.

The Anal Imaginary – A sole-authored study of symbolic and discursive ideas about the relationship between excretion and money from the mid nineteenth-century until the late twentieth.

Feminine Sexual Pathologies – An international collaborative project deriving from 2 conferences in 2006 and 2008 (Prato, Italy), on the medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic, literary and sexological accounts of feminine sexual desire in early modern Europe to the turn of the twentieth-first century.

Frigidity, A Long History – A dual-authored study (with Peter Cryle) of the notions of feminine sexual coldness, frigidity, anaphrodisia and vaginismus in the history of medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, literature and medicine, with a focus on France.

Gendered Signs and Sexual Symbols in the History of French Political Culture – An international collaboration of French historical scholars deriving from a special theme day of the 2007 George Rudé Seminar in French History (Brisbane).

Cultural Historiography and the History of Humanities Interdisciplinarity – A sole-authored study of the idea of 'cultural history' in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European thought, and of the institutional, national, ideological and epistemological concerns entailed in the twentieth-century articulation of the humanities, of interdisciplinarity and of the discipline of history.

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Awards

2009 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Development Grant from the University of Technology Sydney for the project 'The Forgotten History of Cultural Historiography' (Faculty-wide competition).

2008 Early Career Researcher Grant from the University of Queensland for the project ‘Historicising European Cultural History’ (University-wide competition – grant unable to be accepted due to change of academic post).

University of Queensland, Faculty of Arts Conference Funding Scheme for presentation of ‘Sadean Nature in the Dialektik der Aufklärung’, presented at Nature and the Normal - conference at the Monash Centre, Prato, Italy, September 2009 (Faculty-wide competition).

2006 Travel Grant from the Australian Academy of the Humanities for project on ‘Sadism, Masochism and Gender Identification in France, 1890-1925’ (National competition).

2005 University of Queensland New Staff Grant for project ‘The Anal Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe’ (University-wide competition)

2002 Grant-in-Aid from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality for travel relating to research on gay SM subcultures in the U.S. (International competition)

1995-1999 Australian Postgraduate Award

1997 John Frazer Travel Scholarship for postgraduate research overseas, the University of Sydney (University-wide competition)

1995 University Medal for History Honours, University of Sydney

1994 Philipp Erdos Prize for best History Honours thesis, University of Sydney

1993 Isabel King Memorial Prize for outstanding achievement in undergraduate History III, University of Sydney

Publications

Books

Frigidity: An Intellectual History, co-authored with Peter Cryle. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-230-30345-4.

Gendered Signs and Sexual Symbols in the History of French Political Culture, edited volume. (New York: Cambria), forthcoming February 2012.

Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism and Historical Teleology. (Lanham: Lexington Books [Rowman & Littlefield]), forthcoming March 2012.

Book Chapters

Androgyny, Perversion and Social Evolution in Interwar Psychoanalytic Thought. In Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (eds), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

Introduction: Historicising Sexual Metaphorics. In Alison Moore (ed.) Gendered Signs and Sexual Symbols in the History of French Political Culture (New York: Cambria, forthcoming 2012)

The Erotic Republic: Dynamic Exchanges Between Politics and Sexology in the French Third Republic. In Alison Moore (ed.) Gendered Signs and Sexual Symbols in the History of French Political Culture (New York: Cambria, forthcoming 2012)

Sadism As Social Violence. In Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fischer (eds.), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 221-235.

Colonial Visions of ‘Third World’ Toilets: A Nineteenth-Century Discourse That Haunts Contemporary Tourism. In Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (eds.), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 97-113.

Fin de Siècle Sexuality and Excretion. In Peter Cryle and Christopher Forth (eds.), Fin de Siècle Sexuality: The Making of a Central Problem (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 125-139.

Pathologising Female Sexual ‘Frigidity’ in Fin-De-Siècle France, Or How Absence Was Made Into a Thing. In David Evans and Kate Griffiths (ed.s), Pleasure and Pain in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 191-204.

Sexualités, identités, nationalismes. In François Rouquet, Fabrice Virgili, Danièle Voldman (eds.), Amours, guerres et sexualité, 1914-1945 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 18-25.

History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: Visuality of the Vichy Past Through the Silent Image of Women. In Patricia Hayes (ed.), Visual Genders, Visual Histories. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 139-163.

Kakao and Kaka: Chocolate and the Excretory Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. In Ana Carden-Coyne and Christopher Forth (eds.), Cultures of the Abdomen: Dietetics, Digestion and Obesity in the Modern World. (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 51-69.

Spiritual Sadomasochism: Western and Tantric Perspectives. In Natalya Lusty and Ruth Walker (eds.), Masochism: Disciplines of Desire, Aesthetics of Cruelty. (Sydney, PG ARC Publications, 1998), 65-78.

The Medieval Body and the Modern Eye; A Corporeal Reading of the Old French Fabliaux. In Francesca Bussey and John O. Ward (eds.), Worshipping Women; Misogyny and Mysticism in the Middle Ages. (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1997), 237-282.

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Journal Articles

The Spectacular Anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s Unique Historic Context. French Cultural Studies (Accepted 29th of March 2011, forthcoming 2012).

Arcane Erotica and National 'Patrimony': Britain's Private Case and the Collection de l'Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Cultural Studies Review 18 (1) March 2012, 4-24.

Is the Unspeakable Singable? Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and the Ethics of Holocaust Empathy, Portal, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 8 (1) January 2011, 1-17.

Sadean Nature and Reasoned Morality in Adorno/Horkheimer’s ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Psychology and Sexuality 1 (3), September 2010, 249-260.

Frigidity, a Slippery and Capacious Concept, co-authored with Peter Cryle, Journal of the History of Sexuality 19 (2) January 2010, 243-261.

The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality. Sexualities 12 (4), October 2009, 489-506.

Recovering Difference in the Deleuzian Dichotomy of Masochism-without-Sadism. Angelaki 14 (3), November 2009, 27-43.

Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History – From Jean Fauconney to Marie Bonaparte. French Cultural Studies 20 (4), November 2009, 331-349

Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris. Australian Feminist Studies 24 (60), April 2009, 149-165.

Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886-1930. Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (1), January 2009, 138-157.

The Invention of the Unsexual: Situating Frigidity in the History of Sexuality and in Feminist Thought. In Vesna Drapac and André Lambelet (eds.), French History and Civilization. Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 2 (2009), 181-192.

Sadomasochistic Desire as Fascism. Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review 6 (3), November 2005, 163-176.

History, Memory and Trauma in Photography of the Tondues: visuality of the Vichy past through the silent image of women. Gender and History 17 (3), November 2005, 657-681.

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Membership / Engagement

Affiliate of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE) at the University of Exeter.

Honourary Research Advisor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses (CHED) at the University of Queensland.

Peer reviewer for the journals Australian Feminist Studies, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, GLQ and Sexualities.

Member (since December 2011) of the comité de lecture (editorial board) of the French gender history journal CLIO Histoire Femmes et Sociétés.

Member (since May 2009) of the comité de lecture (editorial board) of the French gender and sexuality journal Genre, Sexualité et Société.

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