Kyle Frackman
Research Classification
Research Interests
Relevant Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Options
Recruitment
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
Supervision Enquiry
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision (2010 - 2021)
This thesis offers a posthumanist reading of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories on body-ego and its somatic relations to the environment in Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id), Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), and Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents). Agential Realism, a philosophy proposed by Karen Barad, builds on recent insights in quantum physics. Using Barad’s theory, I read bodies as “intra-actively” entangled with matter and meaning, so that the body-ego as “phenomenon” materializes from a co-constitutive subject position within relationships with others. Unlike interaction, where pre-existing entities meet, “intra-action” emphasizes the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. This approach allows re-centering the body in ego formation and the subject-object relations in psychoanalysis. Following Barad’s understanding that “knowing is a direct material engagement” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007), this analysis offers novel paths to engage with Freud’s creative somatic materializations in the body. Posthumanist feminist philosophies are uniquely situated to elucidate the intra-activity of the unconscious as enlivened and productive. This “biological phantasy” (Wilson, Gut Feminism 2015) as both somatic and imaginary, constitutes a collective event through which body-ego emerges. Just as “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” (Barad), this material reworking provides a novel understanding of the creative relation of the Freudian body-ego with cultural phenomena and collective states. The proposed theory offers new perspectives on psychoanalysis through a new materialist lens when navigating the willful aberrations of bodily unruliness.
View record
News Releases
Publications
- "Du bist Nummer 55": Girls' Education, Mädchen in Uniform, and Social Responsibility (2019)
- “Du bist Nummer 55”: Girls’ education, Mädchen in uniform, and social responsibility (2019)
Seminar - A Journal of Germanic Studies, 55 (2), 110-127 - Based on a True Story: Tracking What Is Queer about German Queer Documentary (2018)
- Gender and Sexuality in East German Film (2018)
- Persistent Ambivalence: Theorizing Queer East German Studies (2018)
Journal of Homosexuality, - THE EAST GERMAN FILM COMING OUT (1989) AS MELANCHOLIC REFLECTION AND HOPEFUL PROJECTION (2018)
German Life and Letters, 71 (4), 452--472 - Finland, civil war and revolution, 1914–1918 [Encyclopedia article] (2017)
The University of British Columbia, - Justinian Jampol, ed. Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDRJustinian Jampol, ed. Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR. Cologne: Taschen, 2014. 904 pp. US$150 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-3-8365-4885-4. (2017)
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53 (3), 305--307 - Review of Barbara Mennel. "The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature." (2017)
- To Be Gay in 1950s Zurich : [film review] (2016)
The University of British Columbia, - Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic (2015)
Camden House, - The Reality of the Body: Transgender, Transsexuality, and Truth in 'Romeos' (2015)
- A Genius of Our Own: The GDR and DEFA's Beethovens (2014)
- An other kind of home: Gender-sexual abjection, subjectivity, and the uncanny in literature and film (2014)
An other Kind of Home: Gender-Sexual Abjection, Subjectivity, and the Uncanny in Literature and Film, 9, 1-181 - Beethoven duet : a genius of our own: the GDR and DEFA’s Beethovens (2014)
University of Massachusetts at Amherst. DEFA Film Library, - Book review: Cinema and social change in Germany and Austria edited by Gabrielle Mueller and James M. Skidmore (2014)
Johns Hopkins University Press, - Book review: Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe (2014)
The University of British Columbia, - Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria ed. by Gabrielle Mueller, James M. Skidmore (2014)
German Studies Review, 37 (1), 243--246 - Vor Ort: The Functions and Early Roots of German Regional Crime Fiction (2014)
- Coming Out of the Iron Closet : Contradiction in East German Gay History and Film (2013)
The University of British Columbia, - Book review: Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz, edited by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson (2012)
The University of British Columbia, - Book review: Von Kraftmenschen und Schwächlingen: Literarische Männlichkeitsentwürfe bei Lessing, Goethe, Schiller und Mozart by Martin Blawid. (2012)
The University of British Columbia, - Lola and Billy the Kid (2012)
- Lola and Billy the Kid [Film critique] (2012)
Intellect Books, - Return to Go (2012)
- Return to go [Film critique] (2012)
Intellect Books, - The Curious Case of the Turkish Drag Queen: Film and Social Justice Education in Advanced German (2012)
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), - Von Kraftmenschen und Schwachlingen. Literarische Mannlichkeitsentwurfe bei Lessing, Goethe, Schiller und Mozart. Von Martin Blawid. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. vi + 412 Seiten. 99,95. (2012)
Monatshefte, 104 (3), 428--430 - Von Kraftmenschen und Schwachlingen. Literarische Mannlichkeitsentwurfe bei Lessing, Goethe, Schiller und Mozart. Von Martin Blawid. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011. vi + 412 Seiten. 99,95. (2012)
- Something Old, Something New (2011)
Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German, - Something Old, Something New: Integrating Canonical Works in a German Studies Curriculum (2011)
Blackwell Publishing, - Book review: Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now by Bernard Freydberg. (2010)
The University of British Columbia, - Book review: Shadows of the Past: Austrian Literature of the Twentieth Century edited by Hans Schulte and Gerard Chapple. (2010)
The University of British Columbia, - Book review: The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy edited by Frederick C. Beiser. (2010)
The University of British Columbia, - Finland, Civil War and Revolution, 1914-1918 (2009)
The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, - The Abject of My Affection: 'Heimosexuality' in German Texts and Films (2009)
- German Literature (2008)
- German Literature [Encyclopedia article] (2008)
Greenwood Press, - Hirschfeld, Magnus [Encyclopedia article] (2008)
Greenwood Press, - Magnus Hirschfeld (2008)
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing (2008)
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing [Encyclopedia article] (2008)
Greenwood Press, - From Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context (2007)
Membership Status
Member of G+PS
View explanation of statuses
Program Affiliations
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.