Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant (born 1957) is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 1984. Berlant received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She writes and teaches on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought (Habermas) that attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation. This work also sees sentimentality, trauma, and related public modes not as the opposite of rationality but in line with other visceral, yet cultivated ways of knowing and being attached to the world.

She is the author of a national sentimentality trilogy beginning with The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), which looks at the relation between modes of belonging mediated by the state and the law, modes of belonging mediated by the aesthetic, and especially by genre, and modes that grow from within the everyday life of social relations. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship--the title essay of which won the 1993 Norman Foerster Award for best essay of the year in American Literature—introduced the idea of the “intimate public sphere,” which looks at the production of politics and publicness since the Reagan era by way of the circulation of the personal, the sexual, and the intimate. Her following book, The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2008. There, the origin of intimate publics in the mass cultural phenomenon of “women’s culture,” which crosses over the everyday institutions of intimacy, mass society, and, more distantly and ambivalently, politics, is pursued through readings especially of remade movies, such as Show Boat, Imitation of Life, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her newest monograph, Cruel Optimism, was published in October, 2011, by Duke University Press. This book works across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as neoliberalism wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state: it reads the literature and “cinema of precarity” to get at the cruel optimism that obtains when people stay attached to lives that don’t work.

She has pursued this line of thought and feeling as well as a member of Feel Tank Chicago and on the way has edited books on Compassion (2004) and Intimacy (2001), which won an award for being the best special issue among all journals in the same year from the Academy of American Publishers, and which are interlinked with her work in feminist and queer theory in essays like "Sex in Public" (Critical Inquiry (1999)), Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (with Lisa Duggan, 2001) and Venus Inferred (with photographer Laura Letinsky, 2001). Berlant works with many journals, including as editor of Critical Inquiry and Public Culture, and helped to found and has chaired the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.