Inaugural Lecture: Evil in Mind – Madness, Abuse, Addiction & Culture

The Inaugural Lecture of Professor Jason Lee from the Faculty of Arts,Design and Technology.

This lecture examines transgressive aspects of culture, asking are culture and transgression synonymous?

In this lecture Professor Lee follows on from Nietzsche’s claim that ours is a culture of addiction, and that culture is synonymous with addiction.

Drawing on a number of his own publications which have been translated into eight languages, including the books Madness and the Savage (1999), which explores cultural constructions of ‘madness’ and the perception of indigenous Americans in film, plus Pervasive Perversions (2005), which examines child sexual abuse in popular culture, and Celebrity, Pedophilia and Ideology (2009), Professor Lee elaborates on how what we demonise mirrors who we are. Through this analysis we discover that our boundaries of so-called normality are tenuous and constructed, and how cultural constructions of how we transgress these boundaries may more fully reveal our identities individually and collectively.

Please book your place on the University of Derby website: http://www.derby.ac.uk/lee