Affiliated Faculty
Lauren Berlant, Director of the Lesbian & Gay Studies Project, Professor of English and former Director of the Center for Gender Studies
Lauren Berlant is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. She has edited Intimacy and, with Lisa Duggan, Our Monica, Ourselves, both of which focus on the centrality of normative and nonnormative intimacies to membership in various publics, especially in the contemporary United States. Additionally, she is completing two books on the institutionalization of affective norms in subcultural rhetorics of the public sphere, "women's culture" (The Female Complaint) and trauma culture (Cruel Optimism). These projects demonstrate the link between her interests in the rhetorical, aesthetic, and institutional practices that make political subjects and sexual cultures, aesthetic practices and subjectivized affects. In addition, she is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry and Topia, as well as a contributing editor of Public Culture.
Deborah Nelson, Associate Professor of English, Director of the Center for Gender Studies
Deborah Nelson is the author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America which interprets postwar confessional poetry and changing norms of self-disclosure in relation to Supreme Court decisions establishing the right to privacy and analyzes how shifting definitions of privacy transformed understandings of the citizen and public sphere. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies and Home/Making: The Poetics and Politics of Home. She teaches courses on late 20th-century U.S. poetry and literature; cultural criticism, and gender theories.
Stuart Michaels, Assistant Director for Curriculum and Development, Center for Gender Studies, Undergraduate Program Chair
Stuart Michaels teaches core courses in gender and sexuality studies. In conjunction with the Curriculum Commitee chair, he is leading an initiative to review and develop the gender studies curricula. Michaels has conducted extensive research on AIDS and sexual behavior in both France and the United States, and he coauthored The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (University of Chicago, 1994).
Cathy J. Cohen, Professor of Political Science
Cathy Cohen is the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and the co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Her work has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, GLQ, NOMOS and Social Text. Cohen is also co-editor with Frederick Harris of a new book series from Oxford Press entitled "Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities." Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.
Bertram J. Cohler, Professor, The Committee on Human Development, The Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities
Bertram Cohler is the first author (together with Robert Galatzer-Levy) of The Course of Lesbian and Gay Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Chicago, 2000) and is completing a manuscript, Writing Desire: Social Change and Life-Writing Among Men Having Sex with Other Men. His most recent work focuses on aging and life-course among self-identified gay men, social change and the course of gay and lesbian lives, and gay and lesbian family studies. He is presently on the editorial board and book review editor of the Journal of LGBT Family Studies. A graduate psychoanalyst (The Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago) Cohler is also on the editorial board of The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy and a former member of the Committee on Homosexuality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Cohler is a former Board member of Horizons Community Services in Chicago and presently serves as a volunteer psychotherapist and supervisor for Horizons Psychotherapy Services.
Raúl Coronado, Assistant Professor of English
Raúl Coronado is currently working on his book manuscript "Competing American Modernities: Politics, Publishing, and the Making of U.S.-Mexican Literary Culture" which historicizes and theorizes nineteenth-century Mexican borderland publications and the creation and specialization of genres (e.g., journalism, history, ethnography, fiction). His manuscript began--and is part of--a larger project to historicize the emergence of queer Chicana/o subjectivities in the 20th century. His publications include: “Bringing It Back Home: Desire, Jotos, Men, and the Sexual/Gender Politics of Chicana and Chicano Studies” in The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, forthcoming; “Selena’s Good Buy: Texas Mexicans, History, and Selena Meet Transnational Capitalism" in Aztlán: The Journal of Chicano/a Studies 26.1 (Spring 2001); and “Unthinkable Bodies (Un)Made: Notes Towards a Historicizing of Chicana/o Sexuality” in Expanding Raza World Views: Sexuality and Regionalism.
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is a specialist in nineteenth-century Latin American literature and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history. Her work, including her book Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la Guerra (Cuba 1860-1898), focuses on the relationship between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities. She is the author of numerous essays analyzing the interconnections between queer sexualities, gender and anti-colonial politics in twentieth-century Puerto Rico, including “Nationalism, Male Anxiety and the Lesbian Body in Puerto Rican Narrative” in Hispanisms and Homosexualities, and “Community at its Limits: Silence, Orality, Law and the Homosexual Body in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s ‘¡Jum!’” in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings. She is also one of the co-editors of Herencia. The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Oxford UP, 2002), and of En otra voz. Antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (Arte Público Press, 2002).
Rebecca Zorach, Assistant Professor of Art History
Rebecca Zorach is Assistant professor of Art History and has worked on gender and sexuality in French and Italian Renaissance art, including articles on "Sodomy and the Scandal of Style in Sixteenth-Century France" (in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies) and "Desiring Things" (in a special issue of the journal Art History also published as a book, Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly, edited by Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin). Her interests also include contemporary art and film and critical theory.