Dr Lene Auestad holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Ethics Programme, University of Oslo. She writes and lectures internationally on ethics, critical theory and psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on prejudice, racism, discrimination, trauma and nationalism. She is an Associate Member of the Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society.

She is the author of Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac 2015), and the editor of Psychoanalysis and Politics: Exclusion and the Politics of Representation (Karnac 2012), Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac 2014), Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning (Karnac 2017), and, with Amal Treacher Kabesh, Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought (Palgrave 2017).

In 2010 she founded the international and interdisciplinary conference series Psychoanalysis and Politics
(www.psa-pol.org), which aims to address how crucial contemporary political issues may be fruitfully analysed through psychoanalytic theory and vice versa – how political phenomena may reflect back on psychoanalytic thinking. The series continues to this day, with annual conferences in different European countries.

She also works as a translator, mainly within philosophy and psychoanalysis, from English into Norwegian and from Norwegian into English.