Lauren Berlant

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Lauren Berlant is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. She writes on issues of popular culture and on the nature of citizenship. She is the author of 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. She is also author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991). She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where emotions take precedence over rational or deliberative thought (Habermas) in attaching strangers to each other and shaping the terms of the state-civil society relation; but part of this work is also to see sentimentality, trauma, and related public modes not as the opposite of rationality but in a line with other cultivated ways of knowing. She has pursued this line of thought and feeling 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).