David M. Halperin

David M. Halperin

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Intellectual and Cultural History

Competition: US & Canada

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

David Halperin was born in Chicago, and received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1973 and a Ph.D. in classics and humanities from Stanford University in 1980. Mr. Halperin is well known for his combination of classics and the history of homosexuality in his studies of contemporary sexuality, social theory, and cultural practice. He served as a professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1979 to 1996, and as a lecturer in sociology at the University of New South Wales from 1996 to 1999, where he remained an Honorary Professor until 2006. He is currently the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of English, women’s studies, comparative literature, and classical studies. He was a Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities from 2002 to 2003. In addition, he has been a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, as well as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He also served as the co-founding editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies from 1991 to 2006.

Mr. Halperin’s publications include One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, 1990) and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993), co-edited with Henry Abelove and Michèle Aina Barale, which received a Lambda Literary Award. He has also published a book on the Hellenistic Greek poet Theocritus (Yale UP, 1983), a collection of essays entitled Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (1990), co-edited with John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford UP, 1995), How to Do the History of Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2002), What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (University of Michigan Press, 2007; rev. ed. 2009), and Gay Shame, edited with Valerie Traub (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on How to Be Gay (University of Michigan Press), forthcoming. Mr. Halperin is the recipient of the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay and Lesbian Caucus at the Modern Language Association, as well as the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

 

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