Megan Williams – författare

The Civil War was the first 'image war', as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and literary form. Through The Negative offers an account of the collisions between print and visual culture in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Crane as they responded to and incorporated the work of such photographers as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner and Jacob Riis. Through the Negative examines how key nineteenth-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction. In so doing, Megan Williams demonstrates how analyzing the impact of photography on the diverse narrative histories of the nineteenth century yields fresh insights about contemporary art and writing, as the photographic image continues to shape national consciousness.

The Civil War was the first 'image war', as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and literary form. Through The Negative offers an account of the collisions between print and visual culture in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Crane as they responded to and incorporated the work of such photographers as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner and Jacob Riis. Through the Negative examines how key nineteenth-century American writers attempted to combat, understand, and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction. In so doing, Megan Williams demonstrates how analyzing the impact of photography on the diverse narrative histories of the nineteenth century yields fresh insights about contemporary art and writing, as the photographic image continues to shape national consciousness.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production.Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Lacanian Psychoanalytic Writings: The Littoral Word presents cutting-edge Lacanian psychoanalytic thought by leaders in the field.Each chapter is written by authors who, in one way or another, take up Jacques Lacan’s observation that each psychoanalysis invents psychoanalysis anew. They bring to the field not an orthodoxy but a rigorous singularity which continues to be pertinent to what Freud described as the malaise of civilisation. Megan Willliams brings together important work by Jean Allouch, Christian Fierens and members of the Freudian School of Melbourne, exploring themes of madness, hysteria, sexuality and language through a Lacanian lens.This essential collection will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists. It will also be of interest to academics and scholars of philosophy, cultural studies, literature and linguistics who engage with psychoanalytic theory.

Lacanian Psychoanalytic Writings: The Littoral Word presents cutting-edge Lacanian psychoanalytic thought by leaders in the field.Each chapter is written by authors who, in one way or another, take up Jacques Lacan’s observation that each psychoanalysis invents psychoanalysis anew. They bring to the field not an orthodoxy but a rigorous singularity which continues to be pertinent to what Freud described as the malaise of civilisation. Megan Willliams brings together important work by Jean Allouch, Christian Fierens and members of the Freudian School of Melbourne, exploring themes of madness, hysteria, sexuality and language through a Lacanian lens.This essential collection will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists. It will also be of interest to academics and scholars of philosophy, cultural studies, literature and linguistics who engage with psychoanalytic theory.

After her six-year-old daughter puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams decides to abandon a career as an academic and become a police officer. It’s not lost on her that she may have applied to the Police Academy to escape the realities of mothering twins born via IVF at twenty-nine weeks. As the twins grow and test her endlessly, she feels she is failing. She needs a win.During a grueling application process, Megan measures herself against the other candidates and confronts the normative notions of what it is to be a good mother. The paralyzing fear that she is a bad mother looms large in her head, as does the real possibility that she might not make the cut at the Academy. With its intertwined narratives of police recruitment and motherhood, the memoir provides an unflinching journalistic view of big-city law enforcement, set atop a personal journey during which Megan learns gratitude and makes peace with a motherhood far different from the dream sold to her by our culture.