Rachel Bowlby

Starting from an interest in changing cultural stories, Rachel Bowlby has written on various subjects connected with modern life—from shopping to commuting to parenting—and on representations of it ranging from Baudelaire to Woolf, and from Freud to supermarket trade journals. With a background in classics as well as in modern literature, she has also written about how and why Freud drew on ancient tragedy and myth for his twentieth-century theory of subjectivity. She has translated several works by contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida. Her most recent book, which was supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, is A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (2013). She is currently working on a short book on realism.