Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, literary critic and queer theorist, taught most recently at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English. Her prior appointments include serving as Duke University’s Newman Ivey White Professor of English.

Sedgwick was awarded the James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize in 2002 for her contribution to lesbian and gay studies. Her book of queer literary criticism Epistemology of the Closet (1990) received Honorable Mention as a contender for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell prize in 1991. Epistemology of the Closet was reviewed in Signs by Claudia Card in Autumn 1993 (Vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 252-56) and reissued with a new preface in 2008.

Sedgwick’s other publications include Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985); Tendencies (1993); Fat Art, Thin Art (1994); Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997); Dialogue on Love (1999); and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003).

In Winter 2001 (Vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 556-60) Sarah E. Chinn reviewed Sedgwick’s Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction for Signs. Sharon Marcus, in her Autumn 2005 (Vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 191-218) piece, “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” explained that with Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire Sedgwick helped resituate academic work on gender and sexuality “by synthesizing feminist theory with scholarship on male homosexuality” (199). As recently as Summer 2009 (Vol. 34, no. 4) Signs authors have cited Sedgwick’s work.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick died April 12, 2009.