Michelle Rada

Michelle Rada is a scholar and editor with research interests in psychoanalysis, literary and visual modernism, feminism, media studies, and critical theory. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Brown University (2024). Michelle is currently at work on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “The Ornamental Unconscious: Modernism, Psychoanalysis, and the Functions of Form,” which threads innovations in modernist literature, architecture, and design with the contemporaneous rise of the psychoanalytic clinic. The project traces a crucial tension across twentieth-century aesthetic form and psychoanalysis: between the desire to distill form into pure functionality and to assert the overdetermined excesses of form. Attending to the dynamic circulation of aesthetic movements and theories of subjectivity and mental illness across the Atlantic in the first half of the twentieth century, “The Ornamental Unconscious” argues that modernist literature negotiates emergent contradictions between form as functional machine and dysfunctional excrescence. Ornament names the formal logic of excess, emptiness, and error at the heart of modernity’s crisis of meaning. In readings of formally experimental literary texts originating from London and Dublin to Caracas and Buenos Aires—Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and The Waves, Joyce’s Ulysses, Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia, and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel—each chapter illuminates facets of an “ornamental unconscious” coursing through modernist literature, visual culture, and psychoanalytic theory.

Michelle is associate editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and senior editor of Parapraxis, a magazine for public-facing psychoanalytic writing on culture, politics, and the clinic. In 2022, she edited and contributed to a special double issue on “Psychoanalysis and Solidarity” for differences. For the third issue of Parapraxis, her article on “indifference” explores how this seemingly unpsychoanalytic concept has a surprisingly vital presence in the history of psychoanalysis, persisting through key developments in accounts of sexual difference and the nature of desire. Her scholarly writing has appeared in James Joyce Quarterly, Room 1000, The Journal of Beckett Studies, The Comparatist, and The Journal of Modern Literature. She has taught courses on global modernism, film and literary theory, and psychoanalytic cultural criticism at Emerson College and Brown University.