Dr. Mikita Brottman

Mikita Brottman, Ph.D. is a British scholar, author, and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture. She earned a D.Phil in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, was a Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, and was Chair of the program in Engaged Humanities with an emphasis in Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute from 2008 to 2010.
 
She currently teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. She has written influentially on horror films, critical theory, reading, psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist, Gershon Legman.
 
Mikita also writes for mainstream and counterculture journals and magazines. Her work has appeared in such diverse venues as The Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Bad Subjects, The Fortean Times, Headpress, and Popmatters, where her column Sub Rosa ran from January 2007 to July 2009. Her essays have also appeared in a number of books and anthologies.
 
She is the author of books on the horror film, cannibalism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and contemporary popular culture. Her most recent book, The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Counterpoint, 2008) was selected as one of the Best Books of 2008 by Publishers Weekly, who said: “Sharp, whimsical and impassioned, Brottman’s look at the pleasures and perils of compulsive reading is itself compulsively readable and will connect with any book lover.”
 
Mikita authored Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif, High Theory/Low Culture, Meat is Murder!: New Edition: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture, Car Crash Culture, Funny Peculiar: Gershon Legman and the Psychopathology of Humor, and Hollywood Hex: An Illustrated History of Cursed Movies.
 
Read The Influencing Machine and Technophobia. Read many more of her articles. Follow her Twitter feed.