LAUREN BERLANT Interview

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of English, University of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 1984. Berlant received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She writes and teaches on issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship. She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought. These attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation. She is the author of, among other books, Sex, or the Unbearable (with Lee Edelman), Cruel Optimism, and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture.