Her career has been marked by several notable accolades, including being honored with a Gold Chalk Medal from the University of Missouri for her excellence in teaching.
COLUMBIA, MO, April 30, 2024 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Ellie Ragland, PhD, has been selected for inclusion in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Ragland has established herself as a distinguished psychoanalyst, working in private practice since 2009. She has also spent decades in education and has been recognized as Professor Emerita in the English department at the University of Missouri. She began her career in the classroom in 1963 and concluded it in 2014. Dr. Ragland's forty-five-year tenure in teaching started at Grand Blanc High School, where she taught French from 1963-1964. In 1970 while she was finishing her doctorate at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Dr. Ragland began her tenure as a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago where she taught until 1986. She left Chicago for the University of Florida (Gainesville) where she transitioned into the English department as a member of the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts. While there, she started the first English language journal on Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic teaching, a journal she continued to edit in 1989 when the University of Missouri (Columbia) hired her as the department chair of English. While there, Dr. Ragland founded a second Lacan journal and made significant strides in merging the English and French departments. Her work in creating international conferences in psychoanalysis and organizing study days at workshops in Paris gave her a basis for working with psychiatrists and psychoanalysts nationally and internationally and inspired her to develop the English department by enhancing faculty diversity and interdepartmental programs.
She accomplished this through the agreement she had made with the Dean to hire ten new faculty members with the goal of creating interdisciplinarity, a path she had followed since her time at the University of Illinois where she created the Student-Designed-Curriculum Program, as well as several Study Abroad Programs in different disciplines and different countries. In addition, Dr. Ragland's strong publication record earned her various awards, including a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
Around the time she received emerita status, Dr. Ragland was also awarded the prestigious Frederick A. Middlebush endowed Chair in the English department. In 1994-1995, Dr. Ragland's academic journey included teaching in the department of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII at Saint-Denis (Sorbonne).
Renowned for her expertise in French literature and psychoanalysis, Dr. Ragland has authored 10 books and over 100 articles and given over 200 lectures nationally and internationally. Her seminal book Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis garnered her international attention upon its release in 1986, and it remains the "go-to" book for anyone embarking upon the study of psychoanalysis. Not only was it the first book in the Anglophone world to explicate the notoriously challenging teaching of the thinker Jacques Lacan, but her books and articles have also become basic guides to learning in this field. Her work has earned her praise in a 2022 collection of essays for being "today's leading psychoanalytic theorist in the anglophone world." Additionally, Dr. Ragland's 2004 publication, The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan, has been widely acclaimed for its critical examination of Lacanian theory on gender issues looked at in terms of logic, not biology: It has been described as a classic that should go alongside Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Her 2004 book, Lacan: Topologically Speaking, was the first book on Lacan and topology to appear in Anglophone countries. It presented Lacan's unprecedented adaptation of mathematical topology to psychoanalysis. Her 2015 book on The Logic of Structure: Topology and Language in psychoanalysis makes sense of diagnostic criteria that are only blurred in the American DSM system. She is currently working on a book that concerns feminine psychology and psychoanalytic diagnostics; it will come out in two volumes, as will another, Proving Lacan, that features her students and colleagues. Her work has earned her the Gradiva Prize for the advancement of psychoanalysis in the United States. Moreover, as the first American to open Lacan's teaching up to the public, she has been commissioned to write her memoirs of the growth and development of psychoanalysis in America. For anyone interested in listening to Dr. Ragland lecture, she can be heard on You Tube: "Lacan and Topology with Ellie Ragland," Emancipations with Dr. Daniel Tutt, January 8, 2021; "Hysteria: The Logic of Paradox with Ellie Ragland," Emancipations with Dr. Daniel Tutt, January 15, 2021; "Jacques Lacan's Capitalist Discourse with Ellie Ragland," Emancipations with Dr. Daniel Tutt, February 2, 2021.
The foundation of Dr. Ragland's success can be traced partly to her academic accomplishments. Her 1963 Bachelor of Arts from Michigan State in East Lansing followed her high school graduation in 1959. Her BA degree was in French language, literature and comparative literature. Dr. Ragland received a Master of Arts in French language and literature in 1967 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in French literature, Romance linguistics, comparative literature and Italian in 1972 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Dr. Ragland is affiliated with several professional organizations, including the World Association of Psychoanalysis and the New Lacanian School and the American Rabelais Society, her first book having been a "reader response" treatment of the comic writer Rabelais. Her career has been marked by several notable accolades, including being honored with a Gold Chalk Medal from the University of Missouri for her excellence in teaching.
Looking toward future aspirations, Dr. Ragland is committed to reshaping psychoanalysis in the U.S. and will be granted a second doctorate specializing in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris. Through her work, she aims to contribute to a broader movement that seeks to redefine how "disorders" are understood and treated within the American health care system and the analytic clinic. She was described in March of 2024 by a prominent figure in academia who wrote that he "realize[s] the heights of [her] accomplishments in the adventure of psychoanalysis in the Western world, and it is a bar raised too high for the rest of us. Partly, [her achievements came at the] right place and time, but that's what we say of pioneers and inventors."
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