April 14th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1950-2009
Columbia University Press mourns the loss of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the pioneers of gay and lesbian studies and queer studies. She died in New York following a long battle with breast cancer.
We were fortunate enough to publish one of her earliest works, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, which the New York Times hailed the book as “”one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men’s studies and gay studies.”
Duke University Press, which published many of her works, has a post about Sedgwick and her importance in shaping their list. More tributes are sure to come but there a very nice tributes on the Web sites for The Nation and the New Yorker.
From Richard Kim’s piece in The Nation:
It is difficult to calculate the impact of Sedgwick’s scholarship, in part because its legacy is still in the making, but also because she worked at a skew to so many fields of inquiry. Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and literary, legal and disability studies–Sedgwick complicated and upended them all, sometimes in ways that infuriated more anodyne scholars, but always in ways that pushed established parameters.