Leo Bersani (b.1931, New York City, lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of California at Berkeley. He has also taught at Harvard, Princeton and the College de France. His books include The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986), The Culture of Redemption (1990), Homos (1995) and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (1998) and Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004) and, in 2009, Intimacies (with Adam Phillips). Last year saw the publication of Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, which charts the connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis and aesthetics.