Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Biography

Biography

Eve Kosofsky was raised in a Jewish family in Dayton, Ohio and Bethesda, MD]]. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her Ph.D from Yale University. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She held a visiting lectureship at University of California, Berkeley and taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College. She was also the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University, and then a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

During her time at Duke, Sedgwick and her colleagues were in the academic avant-garde of the culture wars, using literary criticism to question dominant discourses of sexuality, race, gender, and the boundaries of literary criticism. Sedgwick first presented her particular collection of critical tools and interests in the influential volumes Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990). The latter work became one of gay and lesbian studies' and queer theory's founding texts.

She received the 2002 Brudner Prize at Yale. She taught graduate courses in English as Distinguished Professor at The City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY Graduate Center) in New York City, New York, until her death in New York City from breast cancer on April 12, 2009, aged 58.

Eve Kosofsky married Hal Sedgwick in 1969; he survives her. Commentators often pointed out the juxtaposition between Sedgwick's transgressive and often radical writing on the limits of human sexuality with the fact that she maintained a married, monogamous, heterosexual relationship for decades.