Lauren Berlant
Lauren Berlant (31 October 1957, Philadelphia - 28 June 2021, Chicago) was George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy — The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke, 1997), and The Female Complaint (Duke, 2008) — morphed into a quartet, with Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) addressing precarious publics and the aesthetics of affective adjustment in the contemporary U.S. and Europe. A co-editor of Critical Inquiry, they were also the editor of "Intimacy" (special issue of Critical Inquiry, 1998); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (NYU Press, 2001, with Lisa Duggan); Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004); "On the Case" (special issue of Critical Inquiry, 2007); and Reading Sedgwick (Duke, 2019). They blogged at Supervalent Thought and were also a founding member of the artist/activist group Feel Tank Chicago. [1]
Publications
- The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, Chicago University Press, 1991.
- The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, 1997.
- Critical Inquiry 24(2): "Intimacy" (editor), Winter 1998. [2]
- Venus Inferred (with Laura Letinsky), University of Chicago Press, 2000.
- Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (editor, with Lisa Duggan), New York: NYU Press, 2001.
- Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (editor), Routledge, 2004.
- Critical Inquiry 33(4): "On the Case" (editor), Summer 2007. [3]
- The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2008.
- Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011.
- Desire/Love, Punctum Books, 2012, 142 pp.
- Sex, or the Unbearable (with Lee Edelman), 2013.
- The Hundreds (with Kathleen Stewart), Duke University Press, 2019.
- Reading Sedgwick (editor), Duke University Press, 2019.
- On the Inconvenience of Other People, Duke University Press, 2022, 256 pp. Review: Jake Sanders (Eur J Am Stud).
Links
- Blog, 2007-2019 (archived)
- Feel Tank Chicago (archived), Conference on Political Feeling (2007), [4]
- Tributes: Debbie Nelson, Kristen Schilt (Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality U Chicago), Gregg Bordowitz, Lauren Michele Jackson, Andrea Long Chu, Anahid Nersessian, Tavia Nyong'o, H. A. Sedgwick, Caleb Smith, Jean-Thomas Tremblay (n+1), Judith Butler, Maggie Doherty, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Gabriel Winant (Nation), U Chicago News, Alex Traub (New York Times), Artforum.
