Research

I am interested in works of literature, philosophy and film that can help us explore what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. These works can be contemporary or not, fiction or nonfiction, avant-garde or popular culture. At the moment, I am particularly excited about a series of texts and films that allow us to engage with recent technological and ecological developments. 

My previous publications include The Feel-Bad Film from 2015. In this volume, I study of a number of contemporary filmmakers - Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Harmony Korine, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier among others - who have made films that place the spectator in a position of intense discomfort. I ask: What do the directors believe they can achieve via the ‘feel-bad’ experience? And (why) should we watch and study feel-bad films? A podcast about the book can be found here.

More recently, I published Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé (Liverpool University Press, 2022). This study examines how these three nineteenth-century poets speak to the present; I argue that their writings prefigure a view of human subjectivity that is appropriate in our times. A short interview about the book is available on the publisher's blog (the book was recently awarded the 2023 R. Gapper Book Prize by the Society for French Studies).

I am currently working on two very different projects. One is entitled Images of Unrest, and this is a study - jointly written with Daniele Rugo - of documentary films about political violence. It features chapters on directors such as Kazuo Hara, Barbet Schroeder, Éléonore Weber, Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan. The other has the working title World Brains. Here I examine the idea of the world as a coherent (often cognisant) system as it has appeared in 20th and 21st century film, fiction and cultural theory. The current (very ambitious) plan is to engage with artists, thinkers and topics such as H.G. Wells, Alain Resnais, cybernetics, Gaia theory, and Stanisław Lem.

I have also published on André Breton, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Chantal Akerman, James Benning, Judith Butler, and other writers and filmmakers. 

Undergraduate teaching

19th, 20th and 21st century French literature, continental philosophy and film studies.

Graduate teaching and supervision

I teach on the MSt in Film Aesthetics (modules such as 'film and phenomenology', 'contemporary theories of spectatorship' and 'film and the nonhuman') and on the core course for the MSt in Modern Languages ('Key Questions in Critical Thought'). I am always happy to hear from prospective graduate students whose research interests are related to mine.

I currently supervise two PhD-students:

Lingchen Huang: Liquid World and Solid Objects: Affect and the Nonhuman Turn in Clarice Lispector's Writing

Benjamin Micallef: Semio-ecology: An Archeology of Ontological Difference in European Thought (1948-1968)

Publications

Monographs

Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. (232 p.)

The Feel-Bad Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. (200 p.)

Community, Myth and Recognition in 20th Century French Literature and Thought. London: Continuum, 2009. (184 p.)

Le Sacrifice de la sirène - « Un coup de dés » et la poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University Press/Museum Tusculanum, 2003. (219 p.)

 

Edited Books

James Benning's Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration. Eds. Daniele Rugo & Lübecker. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. (192 p.)

Europe's Others – Xenophobia in European Culture. Eds. Bogh, Bruhn, Madsen & Lübecker. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter, 2005. (319 p., in Danish)

 

Selected Articles

'Surrealist Transhumanism: Jean Rostand and Nicole Vedrès's Aux frontières de l'homme (1952)'. World Picture 15, winter (2025). (online)

w. Daniele Rugo: 'In a Sea of Binary Algae: Chris Marker's Level Five as non-representational documentary', 169-86 in Screen 64: 2. (2023)

'Huppert in the Ozon-Machine: Melodrama and Meta-Acting in 8 Femmes', 30-47 in Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (eds. Iggy Cortez & Ian Fleishman), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (2023)

'On Fire: Cézanne, Straub and Huillet', 73-92 in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media #23. (2022)

'Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé - The Politics of the Siren' (6300 words), contribution to the online database: Bloomsbury 20th-Century French Thought. (2022)

'Twenty-First-Century Baudelaire?, Affectivity and Ecology in "Le Crépuscule du soir"', 689-704 in Modernism/modernity 27.4. (2020)

'Mallarmé's Digital Demon', 140-58 in Paragraph 43.2. (2020)

'Landscape Memories: Chantal Akerman's Sud and the Spectator-Environment', 41-56 in Angelaki 24:6. (2019)

'Mallarmé's Instruments: The Production of the Individu-Livre', 367-83 in French Studies 73.3. (2019)

'Violence and Landscape in the Films of James Benning’, 55-72 in James Benning’s Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration (Eds. Lubecker & Rugo). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (2018)

'Bruno Dumont's Comic Look: P'tit Quinquin as social and ethical intervention', 87-99 in Studies in French Cinema 18.1. (2018)

'The Individual as Environment: Watching Jean-Claude Rousseau’s La Vallée close with Lucretius and Simondon', 195-211 in French Ecocriticism (Eds. Finch-Race & Posthumus). Oxford: Peter Lang. (2017)

'Artaud and Sun: Heliogabalus and contemporary non-anthropocentric theory', 17-29 in Image [&] Narrative 17.5. (2016)

'The Politics of Images: Didi-Huberman, Butler and Rancière', 392-407 in Paragraph 36.3. (2013)

'The Poetry of Idiots: Siegrid Alnoy, Lars von Trier, and Bruno Dumont', 438-54 in New Review of Film and Television Studies 11.4. (2013)

'Camus, Bataille et la morale de la révolte', 38-51 in Présence d'Albert Camus no. 3. (2012)

'Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms: The Avant-Garde as Tragedy?', 235-47 in Studies in French Cinema 11.3. (2011)

'Lars von Trier’s Dogville, A Contemporary Feel-Bad Film', 157-68 in Kendall & Horeck (Eds.): The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (2011)

'The Politics of Desire in Paul Nizan's La Conspiration', 19-39 in Contemporary French Civilization 34.1. (2010)

'Can I take you for a ride, Miss? - On the Titles of Wilhelm Freddie', 173-83 in Aagesen (ed.): Wilhelm Freddie. Stick the Fork in your Eye! Copenhagen: The National Museum of Art. (2009)

'Sartre's Silence – The Limits of Recognition in Why Write?', 42-57 in Sartre Studies International 14.1. (2008)

'L'incarnation éclatée - André Breton entre deux siècles', 125-38 in Jørgensen & Ruth (eds.): Les Défis de l'œuvre. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. (2007)

'The Dedramatization of Violence in Claire Denis's I Can't Sleep', 17-33 in Paragraph 30.2. (2007)

 

Translation (book-length)

Georges Bataille: Manet. Et biografisk og kritisk studie. Transl. Per Aage Brandt & Lübecker. Copenhagen: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. (140 p., in Danish)