By Jean H. Hagstrum (NHC Fellow, 1985–86; 1986–87) A magisterial book by one of our most distinguished literary historians, Esteem Enlivened by Desire illuminates (and celebrates) the ideal of lasting love from antiquity to the high Renaissance. Love that leads to marriage is a relatively recent "invention," or so critics and historians often say. But in this … Continued
By Toril Moi (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) What is a woman? And what does it mean to be a feminist today? In her first full-scale engagement with feminist theory since her internationally renowned Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Toril Moi challenges the dominant trends in contemporary feminist and cultural thought, arguing for a feminism of freedom inspired by Simone de … Continued
By Dyan Elliott (NHC Fellow, 1997–98; 2012–13) Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and … Continued
By Steven Marcus (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1980–81; 1981–82) Steven Marcus discusses Freud's famous cases "Dora" and "The Rat Man," as well as the Freud–Fliess correspondence, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and the evolution of Freud's notion of the superego. Through his close reading of various of Freud's theoretical and clinical texts, he … Continued
Edited by Karen Hagemann (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) and Sonya Michel Gender and the Long Postwar examines gender politics during the post–World War II period and the Cold War in the United States and East and West Germany. The authors show how disruptions of older political and social patterns, exposure to new cultures, population shifts, and the … Continued
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 Joanne Meyerowitz (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, … 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 Theresa Braunschneider (NHC Fellow, 2005–06) Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a "coquette"; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? Our … 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.