Rate My Professor Simone Drichel

Dr. Simone Drichel is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago. She holds an MA from the University of Freiburg and a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington. In her teaching, she covers New Zealand and postcolonial literature, as well as literature and psychology, with courses such as ENGL 242 Nation and Narration in New Zealand Literature, ENGL 332 Postcolonial Literatures, ENGL 353 Reading Minds: Literature and Psychology, and ENGL 465 A Topic in New Zealand Literature: Janet Frame. Appointed as Senior Lecturer since 2010, her cross-disciplinary research spans continental philosophy, relational psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and New Zealand literature, with a particular focus on questions of vulnerability, relationality, and narcissism as ethical challenges in contemporary global politics.

Drichel has made significant contributions through her editorial work and publications. She edited the special issue 'Relationality' for Angelaki (volume 24, issue 3, 2019) and 'Vulnerability' for SubStance (volume 42, issue 3, 2013). She co-edited Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame (Rodopi, 2009). Key refereed journal articles include 'The Disaster of Colonial Narcissism' (American Imago, 75.3, 2018), 'Cartesian Narcissism' (American Imago, 73.3, 2016), 'Emmanuel Levinas and the “spectre of masochism”: A Cross-Disciplinary Confusion of Tongues' (Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 14.1, 2019), 'Refusals of Responsibility: A Response to Donna Orange and Robert Bernasconi' (Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 14.1, 2019), 'Maurice Gee's “anti-Cartesian meditations”: Narcissism and Relational Trauma in Plumb' (Textual Practice, 2017), and 'The Time of Hybridity' (Philosophy & Social Criticism, 34.6, 2008). Her book chapters encompass '“A forgiveness that remakes the world”: Trauma, Vulnerability, and Forgiveness in the Work of Emmanuel Levinas' (Phenomenology and Forgiveness, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), 'Beyond Narcissism: Emmanuel Levinas and the “wisdom of love”' (Can Philosophy Love?, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and 'Disgrace' (A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee, Camden House, 2011). Drichel's scholarship engages deeply with ethical relationality, precarity, postcolonial violations, and the crisis of connection, appearing in leading journals like Modern Fiction Studies, Levinas Studies, and borderlands e-journal. Her work advances interdisciplinary dialogues on subjectivity, otherness, and ethical responsiveness.