By Robert Bernard Martin (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) Probably no English poet of the 19th century is today so widely read or greatly loved as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet in his lifetime he was almost entirely unpublished, and only a handful of his close friends knew that he wrote poetry at all.
Edited by Benjamin Kahan (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called "a unified field of sexual abnormality." Kaan's taxonomy consists … Continued
By Martha Vicinus (NHC Fellow, 2000–01) Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female … Continued
By Steven C. Caton (NHC Fellow, 1992–93) Combining ethnography, film criticism, and his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, Steven C. Caton presents an innovative and fascinating examination of the classic film, Lawrence of Arabia. Caton is interested in why this epic film has been so compelling for so many people for more than three decades. … Continued
By David M. Halperin (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of "homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which … Continued
By Todd W. Reeser (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholars—most of them Catholic—read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem: how … Continued
By Jonathan Dollimore (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) A path-breaking book in a rapidly expanding field of literary and cultural study, Sexual Dissidence shows how the literature, histories, and subcultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of … Continued
By Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) God and the Body addresses the challenges to traditional Christianity by gay and lesbian Christians and their critics within the church. This controversial book will be welcomed for the radical new insights it provides into Christian arguments about the body.
By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Tendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" (Rolling Stone). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing. The … Continued
McCarthyism and the Red Scare are well known concepts in American history textbooks. But if you’re only teaching about McCarthy’s attack on suspected communists, you’re leaving out half the story. This webinar explores how homosexuals were also considered threats to national security during the Cold War, how they became conflated with communists and subversives in … Continued