David Halperin | |
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Born | |
Academic background | |
Education | Oberlin College (BA) Stanford University (MA, PhD) |
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Institutions | University of Michigan |
David M. Halperin (born April 2,1952) is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies,queer theory,critical theory,material culture and visual culture. He is the cofounder of GLQ:A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies ,and author of several books including Before Pastoral (1983) and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990).
David Halperin was born on April 2,1952,in Chicago,Illinois. [1] He graduated from Oberlin College in 1973,having studied abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in 1972–1973. [2] He received his PhD in Classics and Humanities from Stanford University in 1980. [1] [2] [3]
In 1977,Halperin served as Associate Director of the Summer Session of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. [2] From 1981 to 1996,he served as Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [1] [2] Alongside Tina Passman,Halperin was one of the first co-chairs of the Lesbian and Gay Classical Caucus,now Lambda Classical Caucus,which was founded in 1989. [4] In 1994,he taught at the University of Queensland,and in 1995 at Monash University. [2] From 1996 to 1999,he was a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New South Wales. [1] He is currently W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of the History and Theory of Sexuality,Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature,and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies.
In 1991,he co-founded the academic journal GLQ:A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies ,and served as its editor until 2006. [1] [5] His work has been published in the Journal of Bisexuality , Identities:Journal for Politics,Gender and Culture , Journal of Homosexuality , Michigan Feminist Studies , Michigan Quarterly Review , Representations ,the Bryn Mawr Classical Review , Ex Aequo , UNSW Tharunka , Australian Humanities Review , Sydney Star Observer , The UTS Review , Salmagundi , Blueboy , History and Theory , Diacritics , American Journal of Philology , Classical Antiquity , Ancient Philosophy , Yale Review , Critical Inquiry , Virginia Quarterly Review , American Notes &Queries , London Review of Books , Journal of Japanese Studies , Partisan Review ,and Classical Journal . [2]
He has been a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina,as well as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center,the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra,and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. [1] In 2008–2009,he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. [1] He received the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay and Lesbian Caucus at the Modern Language Association,as well as the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. [1] In 2011–2012,he received the Brudner Prize at Yale University. [6]
Halperin is openly gay. [7] In 1990,he launched a campaign to oppose the presence of the ROTC on the MIT campus,on the grounds that it discriminated against gay and lesbian students. [8] That same year,he received death threats for his gay activism. [9] [10] In 2003,the Michigan chapter of the American Family Association tried to ban his course 'How to Be Gay:Male Homosexuality and Initiation.' [11] [12] In 2010,he wrote an open letter to Michigan's 52nd Attorney General Mike Cox to denounce the homophobic harassment by one of the latter's staffers,Andrew Shirvell,of a University of Michigan student,Chris Armstrong. [13]
Halperin uses the method of genealogy to study the history of homosexuality. He argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium does not indicate a "taxonomy" of heterosexuals and homosexuals comparable to modern ones. Medieval historian John Boswell has criticized Halperin's arguments. [14]
Halperin's book was published in 1990, [15] two years before the centenary of Charles Gilbert Chaddock's English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis . Chaddock is credited with the first use of the term "homosexual" in English in this translation. [16] Halperin believes that the introduction of this term marks an important change in the treatment and consideration of homosexuality. [15] The book collects six essays by the author. The first essay gives the book its title.
Didier Eribon demanded that his name be withdrawn as a recipient of the 2008 Brudner prize because he did not want to be associated with Halperin, who won the Brudner for his book What Do Gay Men Want? and whom Eribon accused of plagiarizing Eribon's work, Une morale du minoritaire. [17] [18] [19] According to L'Express in 2011, Halperin had not yet responded to Eribon's claims. [18]
In her 1991 essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf", Camille Paglia finds in Halperin's work a prototypical example of rampant careerism in the humanities. Paglia observes that Halperin's generation of academics is prone to a "contemporary parochialism" that eagerly cites hot-off-the-press articles without attempting to critically assess their objective merit in light of the intellectual tradition. Paglia accuses Halperin of assembling a pastiche of the latest faddish opinions and marketing it as a book, not for the sake of advancing the cause of truth, but with no other aim than career advancement. She compares such scholarship to junk bonds, a highly volatile investment. [20] Paglia's long review article was itself criticised in the following issue of Arion by W. Ralph Johnson and Thomas Van Nortwick. [21]
Since Paglia's critique, Halperin has gone on to publish four monographs and co-edited two volumes of queer criticism.
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: CS1 maint: others (link)Jonathan David Katz is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice in Art History and Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cherríe Moraga is a Xicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English since 2017, and in 2022 became a distinguished professor. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena, which is network fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights. In 2017, she co-founded, with Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice, located on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.
Jonathan Ned Katz is an American author of human sexuality who has focused on same-sex attraction and changes in the social organization of sexuality over time. His works focus on the idea, rooted in social constructionism, that the categories with which society describes and defines human sexuality are historically and culturally specific, along with the social organization of sexual activity, desire, relationships, and sexual identities.
Greek Homosexuality is a book about homosexuality in ancient Greece by the classical scholar Kenneth Dover, in which the author uses archaic and classical archaeological and literary sources to discuss ancient Greek sexual behavior and attitudes. He addresses the iconography of vase paintings, the speeches in the law courts, and the comedies of Aristophanes, as well as the content of other literary and philosophical source texts.
Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for both homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.
Richard Dyer is an English academic who held a professorship in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. Specialising in cinema, queer theory, and the relationship between entertainment and representations of race, sexuality, and gender, he was previously a faculty member of the Film Studies Department at the University of Warwick for many years and has held a number of visiting professorships in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.
John D'Emilio is a professor emeritus of history and of women's and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1982, where his advisor was William Leuchtenburg. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1998 and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1997 and also served as Director of the Policy Institute at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1995 to 1997.
John Eastburn Boswell was an American historian and a full professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of religion and homosexuality, specifically Christianity and homosexuality. All of his work focused on the history of those at the margins of society.
Didier Eribon is a French author and philosopher, and a historian of French intellectual life. He lives in Paris.
George Chauncey is a professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known as the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940.
The James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize and Lecture celebrates lifetime accomplishment and scholarly contributions in the field of LGBT Studies. It is given annually by the Committee for LGBT Studies at Yale University. Recipients receive a cash prize and the opportunity to give a public lecture on the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as a second lecture in New York City.
Esther Newton is an American cultural anthropologist who performed pioneering work on the ethnography of lesbian and gay communities in the United States.
Michael David Warner is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University. He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic. He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal based published by Duke University Press. It was co-founded by David M. Halperin and Carolyn Dinshaw in the early 1990s. In its mission, the journal seeks "to offer queer perspectives on all issues touching on sex and sexuality." It covers religion, science studies, politics, law, and literary studies.
Claude J. Summers is an American literary scholar, and the William E. Stirton Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. A native of Galvez, Louisiana, he was the third child of Burg Martin Summers and Theo Coy Causey. He was educated in the public schools of Ascension Parish, graduating from Gonzales High School in 1962. He has long credited two teachers at Gonzales High School—Diana Sevario Welch and Sherry Rushing—for inspiring his interest in academic achievement.
One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and other essays on Greek love is a 1990 book about homosexuality in ancient Greece by the classicist David M. Halperin, in which the author supports the social constructionist school of thought associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The work has been praised by several scholars, but criticized by others, some of whom have attributed to Halperin the view that the coining of the word "homosexuality" in the nineteenth century brought homosexuality into existence. The book was often reviewed alongside John J. Winkler's The Constraints of Desire (1990).
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Henry D. Abelove is an American historian and literary critic, most of whose writings focus on the history of sex during the modern era. He is widely considered to be an important figure in the development of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. He is best known for his groundbreaking books The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists and Deep Gossip along with The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader which codified the fields of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory and provided them with their first teaching anthology.
John Jack Winkler was an American philologist and Benedictine monk.
Elizabeth Freeman was an English professor at the University of California, Davis, and before that Sarah Lawrence College. Freeman specialized in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies. She served as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.