Professor Heather Love
A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of numerous awards, Heather stands at the vanguard of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Her wide-ranging scholarship encompasses queer theory and gender studies, 20th and 21st century literature and culture, affect theory, disability studies, performance theory, and visual/media studies. Her work bridges literature and sociology and engages deeply with questions of critical methodology.
Heather is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has edited several pathbreaking journal special issues. Her landmark 2007 book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, remains central to ongoing conversations about emotion and politics in queer studies. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), has generated a major—and widely remarked upon—disciplinary rapprochement between sociology and literary studies, one with which scholars across fields continue to grapple. Heather is currently at work on To Be Real: The Uses of the Personal in Queer Criticism, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.