Dr Lesley Caldwell

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Research Areas: Cinematic representations of Rome, history of the growth of Rome from 1870 onwards, the family in Italian cinema, psychoanalytic readings of Italian art and culture, psychoanalysis and art.

  • AHRC Research Networking award for a project on 'Roman Modernities' July 2012 to December 2013 with Dr Fabio Camilletti as principle Investigator and Dr. Lesley Caldwell (UCL) as Co-Investigator. The 'Roman Modernities' network aims to bring together scholars, artists, and urban planners to engage in joint enquiry on the city of Rome as a location in reconfiguring the trajectory of Western modernity. Thematically structured events will take place across the UK, Italy, and Germany to include two conferences, one workshop, and a seminar series, overlapping with an exhibition in London and Rome and two film screenings (Warwick). The initial conference was held at the British School at Rome in October 2012. Day long seminars will be held on Fragments in Warwick in term two and Trauma/memory at UCL on 15 March. A public lecture will be given on 14 March at UCL by Professor Sandro Portelli. A round table on Urban Regeneration: Rome and London will be held in the summer term at UCL
  • Dr Caldwell is consultant, with Chiara Saraceno, to the AHRC funded research network, La Mamma: Interrogating a National Stereotype led by Professors Perry Willson and Penny Morris. Two successful workshops have been held in Dundee( May 2012) and Glasgow ( October 2012). The third event takes place in Rome in January, 2013, and the final one will be in Edinburgh in the summer term.
  • Co-Organiser with Dorigen Caldwell( Birkbeck) of the termly Rome lecture series which alternates between UCL and Birkbeck. This grew from the three year seminar series Rome the Growth of the City from the Return of the Popes to the Present also shared between UCL and Birkbeck.
  • Dr Caldwell organises the termly interdisciplinary seminars for the Psychoanalysis Unit where senior academics working on topics of concern to psychoanalysis discuss with practising psychoanalysts.
  • Following the death of Professor Elisabeth Young Bruehl in December 2011, Dr Caldwell, with Helen Taylor Robinson, was appointed Managing Editor, on behalf of the Winnicott Trust, for the Collected Writings of Donald Winnicott.

Recent publications

  • Reading Winnicott  (with Angela Joyce) Routledge New Library Teaching Series (2011)
  • Rome Continuing encounters between Past and Present, with Dorigen Caldwell London, Ashgate. (2011)
  • 'Piazza Vittorio: Cinematic notes on the Evolution of a Piazza' in Caldwell & Caldwell, 189-206, (2011)
  • 'Family Matters' in editors N Segal & S.Kivland  Vicissitudes. Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis  London: IGRS (2011)
  • Psychoanalysis and Italian Studies, special issue Journal Romance Studies co-editor with Francesco Capello (Canterbury) vol 10, number 3, (Winter 2010).
  • 'Playing with the city of Rome' in Caldwell & Capello, 39-54 (December 2010)
  • 'Winnicott/Lacan. Mirroring and transitionality' in C Vanien & A Vanier Winnicott avec Lacan Hermann: Paris. (2010)
  • Review The Italian Psychoanalytic Annual 2008: theory and observation BJP 25(1), 124-129. (2009)
  • Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition. Karnac, London, 2007.
  • 'La psicopatologia della vita quotidiana di Freud. Patologia o "vita quotidiana"?' in Paola di Cori and Clotilde Pontecorvo (eds), Tra ordinario e straordinario: modernita e vita quotidiana, Carocci: Rome, 2007, pp. 34-43.
  • 'Is the political personal? Fathers and sons in Bertolucci's Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo and Amelio's Colpire al cuore', in A. Cento Bull and A. Giorgio (eds), Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, Legenda, Leeds, pp. 69-80.
  • 'What Do Mothers Want? Takes on motherhood in Bellissima, Il grido and Mamma Roma' in P. Morris (ed.), Women in Italy 1945-1960, Palgrave/Macmillan, London and New York, 2006.


Email: l.caldwell@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Caldwell is one of the organisers of the Rome Lecture Series

For Dr Caldwell's homepage, please click here