Professor Picard arrived at AUP in the Fall of 2003 after obtaining her PhD from the University of Toronto and teaching at Western University (Canada) for 14 years.
She teaches and co-teaches courses in the French language and linguistics, literature and psychoanalysis (such as Entering Language: Becoming Human, Art, Women & Madness, Fairy Tales & Child Psychology, French Film & Fiction Now). She has recently founded a monthly joint Research & Teaching Interdisciplinary Seminar in French (FfIRE) with the Organisation international de la Francophonie to make the research of AUP’s scholars and researchers better known.
In her own research and publications, she knits together literary theory and reading theory (i.e. the acquisition of the symbolic function) through structuralist psychoanalysis that renews psychoanalytic literary criticism. Her observations of non-reading children at Sainte-Anne's Hospital in Paris have allowed her to investigate the complexities of “the letter” and its mastery. In her book Lire délire. Psychanalyse de la lecture (Erès, 2010) - published in English From Illiteracy To Literature; Psychoanalysis And Reading (Routlege, 2017) -, she surmises that there are psychological and epistemological commonalities between children learning how to read and creative writers struggling with the letter. Her corpus of study is mainly composed of XXth and XXIth Century French writers (Colette, Sartre, Duras, Cixous, Hébert, Redonnet, Houellebecq, Angot, Michon…).
One reviewer of her book states :
« Anne-Marie Picard sketches an indispensable (and hitherto lacking) general theory of reading. Bridging the gap between infantile dyslexia and high modernist literature, she offers us a Lacanian guide to the letter, or How To Read with psychoanalysis." (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, U. of Pennsylvania). (More reviews here).
LIRE DELIRE, psychanalyse de la lecture. Erès Editions, coll. « psychanalyse & Ecriture », 2010. 184 pages. ISBN : 978-2-7492-1239-5 EAN : 9782749212395
Reviews:
From Illiteracy to Literature : Psychoanalysis and Reading. trans. K. Valendinova (Routledge, 2017). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315659862
Auzanneau, M., Bailly, L., Bounes, M., Ferron, C., Kugler, M., Lemel, G., Lenoble, E., Meljac, C. & A-M. Picard. Les Impossibilités persistantes d’apprentissage de la lecture chez des sujets féminins en cours de scolarisation. Rapport au Ministère de l’emploi et de la solidarité du Gouvernement français (Groupe Permanent de Lutte contre l’Illettrisme, Mission Interministérielle), 1998, 240pp (30% of writing, editing).