Lauren Berlant, A Reader, eds. Lauren Michele Jackson, Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay (under contract with Duke University Press).

Lauren Berlant is one of the preeminent thinkers of the last half-century. For four-plus decades, they created fields—queer theory and affect studies—and transformed disciplines: American studies, anthropology, critical legal studies, feminist studies, geography, and gender and sexuality studies, among others. Lauren Berlant, a Reader will represent the first collection of Berlant’s writings and constitute a gateway for readers to apprehend, analyze, and synthesize the range and intensity of Berlant’s contributions to intellectual, political, and public thinking. As editors, we have selected writings that bring Berlant’s entire career into focus and spotlight notable questions and themes. As former students, we see this volume as an occasion to pay homage to Lauren’s life’s work by helping it receive the extramural recognition that it began to obtain after the publication of Cruel Optimism (2011) and particularly in the last years of Berlant’s life. Given that even the best-versed scholars are still catching up with Berlant’s work, we anticipate that many readers will turn and return to this volume as Berlant’s conceptual idioms and frameworks continue to shape aesthetic, critical, and political-ethical discourses.