Public Conversations - Series 1
Image by C. Sch眉脽ler
The Green Clinic: Sohbet in St. Mary鈥檚 Secret Garden
In this talk, Mukherjee discusses the genesis of the idea animating Unseen City, an experimental and interdisciplinary work drawing on her collaboration with public sector mental health trusts and hospitals, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social workers in six global cities. Starting with Sigmund Freud's Budapest speech on free clinics in 1918, which ushered an international mental health cooperative movement, Unseen City looks at the afterlife of this idealist moment in initiatives worldwide that offer psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in the community. Dwelling on the example of a horticultural therapy initiative in Hackney developed by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis.
When: 23 November 2026
Time: 4.00pm-6.00pm
Where: Room 2.43 Faculty of Arts Building
Who should attend: Staff, students, general public
Ankhi is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham College. Her most recent book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor (Cambridge University Press, 2021), has won Columbia University's Robert S. Liebert Award for "outstanding scholarship in the field of applied psychoanalysis." Mukherjee's second monograph, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford UP, 2014), was awarded the British Academy Prize in English Literature. Her other publications include Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007), and the collections of essays she has edited, namely A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (with Laura Marcus, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), After Lacan (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (with Ato Quayson, Cambridge UP, 2023). Mukherjee has published in competitive peer-reviewed journals and sits on the editorial boards of several international journals. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow of the British Academy (2003-2006), a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (2015), and the John Hinkley (Visiting) Professor at Johns Hopkins University (2019). She was invited faculty at Cornell University's School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) in summer 2019 and Harvard University's Institute for World Literature (IWL) in 2023, 2024,and 2026. Mukherjee has two books forthcoming in 2027: Postcolonial Literature: A Very Short Introduction in the widely circulated VSI series (Oxford UP) and her fourth monograph, Mavericks and Charlatans: Empire, Modernity, and the Authorization of Dreams (Princeton UP).