The Lynch Distinguished Lecturer Series | Lauren Berlant in Conversation with Dana Luciano and Rebecca Wanzo: The Unfinished Business of Cruel Optimism
A recording of the event is now available on the Bonham Centre’s Youtube Channel.
Join The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto for our annual Lynch Distinguished Lecturer Series with guest speaker Lauren Berlant in conversation with Rebecca Wanzo and Dana Luciano. “The Unfinished Business of Cruel Optimism: Crisis, Affect, Sentimentality” will take place on Zoom on November 19, 4:30-6:00 EST. Register on Eventbrite here.
This event will be held as a 500-person Zoom webinar (attendance is first-come, first-served to the webinar on day-of) as well as a Youtube livestream on the online event page.
Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke UP 1997), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke 2008), Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), Sex, or the Unbearable with Lee Edelman (Duke UP, 2014), The Hundreds with Kathleen Stewart (Duke UP, 2017), and Desire/Love (Punctum, 2012).
Rebecca Wanzo is Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University, St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY Press 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020).
Dana Luciano is Associate Professor in the departments of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), the edited volumes “Queer Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, co-edited with Mel Y. Chen (vol. 22 no. 2-3, spring/summer 2015) and Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014), co-edited with Ivy G. Wilson. Luciano is currently at work on the book project How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century US.
Banner art is a mural by Pony Wave.