Heather Love

Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. Love received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines“). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces a genealogy of queer studies in the mid-century American social science.