Diane O’Donoghue is the Director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is also Visiting Professor of Public Humanities at Brown University's John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and a scholar member and faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where she chairs their Division of Interdisciplinary Studies and directs the Ecker Fellows Program. An art historian, she has chaired the Department of Visual and Critical Studies (now Visual and Material Studies) at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, and since joining Tisch College in 2015 her scholarship and public-facing projects frequently intersect. Her specialization in the visual culture and archaeology of early China helped facilitate two bilingual, archival exhibitions ("These Words” and “Endurance Streets") in Boston’s Chinese neighborhood. An interest in connections between archaeology and psychoanalysis brought her to Vienna, where she became involved in descendant advocacy for Nazi-era restitution of a large Jewish cemetery. This latter work in turn inspired aspects of her book, On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious, winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award from Columbia University; previous writings on topics addressing psychoanalysis and visualities have received the Loewenberg, Deutsch, and Silberger Prizes. Her current scholarship now extends to contested sites of memorialization, constructions of public memory and amnesias, and forensic ethics. Read an essay that relates these issues to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Professor O’Donoghue and her colleague, Bridget Conley, of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School at Tufts organized a series of five panels during the 2020-2021 academic year. These presentations introduced twelve speakers who addressed, from various perspectives, ethical issues concerning human remains. Recordings of all the panels are available on the project’s site. A selection of these papers will appear in November 2022 as a co-edited issue of Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
With funding from the Tisch College Community Research Center, she has curated the Program's current project—"Endurance Streets: Resilience and Response in Boston’s Chinese Community” (堅韌的街道: 波士頓華人社區的韌性和反應)—in partnership with the Chinese Historical Society of New England. A public-facing exhibition, installed at two locations in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood, it opened on September 15, 2022 and will be on view through until December 30th.
Recent Publications:
“Making a Ground Dangerous,” in Psychoanalytic Intersections: A Collection of Papers by Visiting Scholars of the Austen Riggs Erikson Institute (NY; London: Routledge, forthcoming, 2023).
“Last Place: Burying the Death in Times of Pandemic.” Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8, no. 2 (2022): 74-93.
“Amnesias of a Freudian Kind, Part II." American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, 78, no.4 (Winter 2021): 601-617.
"Amnesias of a Freudian Kind Part I." American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, 78, no.1 (Spring 2021): 55-77.
"What Readers Matter? Challenging the Disappearance of the Branch Library in Boston’s Chinese Neighborhood." In Doing Public Humanities, edited by Susan Smulyan. New York: Routledge, 2021: 114-129.
"Sigismund’s Wolves." American Imago, 76, no.4 (Winter 2019): 553-567.
On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious. New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
“Image, Loss, Delay.” In Grief and Its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity, edited by Adele Tutter and Léon Wurmser. New York; London: Routledge, 2016, 88-94.
“Liquiphophia und der Schauplatz der Psychoanalyze.” In Verflüssigungen: Ästhetische und semantische Dimensionen eines Topos, edited by Kassandra Nakas. Berlin; Munich: Wilhelm Fink. 2015, 45-56.