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Elizabeth Freeman (1966 – 2024) was an English professor at the University of California, Davis, and before that Sarah Lawrence College. Freeman specialized in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies. She served as Associate Dean of the Faculty for Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.

Education

Freeman completed her bachelor's degree in English at Oberlin College in 1989, followed by an MA and PhD at the University of Chicago in 1991 and 1996 respectively. Freeman's doctoral dissertation was entitled The wedding complex: Sex norms and fantasy forms in modern American culture and was supervised by Dr. Lauren Berlant and Dr. Bill Brown. Freeman was an 'Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities' at the University of Pennsylvania, where she conducted research for her work on weddings and taught undergraduate English classes.

Career

Freeman researched subjects within Queer studies, which she personally believed was defined by sex while accepting a broad definition for the term - including those who had a different approach. She edited a book on Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form with Teagan Bradway. Her article “Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood” received the 2014 Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature.

Freeman was co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies from 2011 until 2017. According to a book review by Ry Montgommery at the London School of Economics, Freeman's work took a "disruptive and inventive approach to questions of kinship, (post)coloniality and queerness".

Biography

Freeman's attention to Queer theory developed from her engagement with AIDS activism in the early 1990s. Freeman died of cancer in June 2024, at the age of 57.

Publications

Books

• The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke UP, 2002)
• Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke UP, 2010)
• Beside You in Time: Sense-Methods and Queer Sociabilities in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2019)

Chapters and Articles

• "Shakers, Not Movers: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance." In Cindy Weinstein, ed. A Question of Time : From Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018.
• "Afterward." In Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent Brintnall and Joseph Marchal. Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2017.
• "Timing Sex in the Age of Digital Reproduction" Special Issue of New Formations, "Timing TransFormations." Forthcoming 2017.
• “Synchronic/Anachronic.” In Joel Burges and Amy Elias, eds. Time: a Vocabulary of the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2016).
• “Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha.’” Journal of Homosexuality 63.3 (2016): 329–348.
• “Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude.” Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson, eds., Unsettled States: Nineteenth Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014).
• “The Chronic: Renate Lorenz in Conversation with Mathias Danbolt and Elizabeth Freeman” (in German), Springerin 1 (Winter 2014): 17–23.
• “Lessons from Object Lessons.” Feminist Formations 25.3 (December 2013).
• “Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21st Century Occupations,” written with Peter Coviello,Social Text Periscope online dossier on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” February 2013.
• “Normal Work: Temporal Drag and the Question of Class.” Catalogue essay for Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Temporal Drag (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 1976–1980.
• “Reimagining Gender and Sexuality,” The Cambridge History of the American Novel(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).
• “Sacramentality and the Lesbian Premodern,” in The Lesbian Premodern, eds. Noreen Giffneyet. al. (Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages Series, 2011).
• “We’re Only Making Plans for Nigel. In Response to Didier Eribon.” Qui Parle 18.2 (2010), 323–27.
• “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History.” differences 19.1 (2008): 32–70.
• "Still After." South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3, special issue, "After Sex," eds. Andrew Parker and Janet Halley (Summer 2007).
• "Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory." A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, eds. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Blackwell Press, 2007), 295–314.
• "Monsters, Inc.: Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education." New Literary History, 36.1, special issue, "Essays in the Humanities." (Winter 2005): 83–96.
• "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography." Social Text #84–85 special issue, The New Queer Theory (October 2005): 57–68.
• "The Whole(y) Family: Economies of Kinship in the Progressive Era." American Literary History16.4 (Winter 2004): 619–47.
• "Queer Bonds." Concerns 27 (Winter 2000): 21–37.
• "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations." New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000): 727–44.
• “Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov.” American Literature 70.1 (December 1998): 109–154.
• “‘The We of Me’: The Member of the Wedding’s Novel Alliances.” Women and Performance 8.2 (1996): 111–135.
• "Teaching Outside the Curriculum: Guerrilla Sex Education and the Public Schools." Coauthored with Anne-Elizabeth Murdy and Scott Mendel. Radical Teacher 45 (Summer, 1994): 17–19.
• " 'What Factory Girls Had Power to Do' : The Techno-logic of Working Class Feminine Publicity in the Lowell Offering." Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (Summer, 1994): 109–128
• "Queer Nationality." Coauthored with Lauren Berlant. boundary 2 (Spring 1992): 149–80. Reprinted in Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) : 193–229.

Awards

• ACLS Fellowship, 2015–16
• Norman Foerster Award for Best Essay in American Literature, 2014
• UC Davis Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award, 2013
• University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2006–2007
• Chancellor's Fellowship, University of California, Davis, 2005–2009
• Consortium for Women and Research Academic Senate Project Grant, UCD, 2004
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Penn Humanities Forum, 1999–2000
• Mellon Dissertation Award, University of Chicago, (declined),1995–96
• Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1990–95
• Florence May Snell Fellowship for Graduate Study, Oberlin College, 1988–92

References

1. ^ "Elizabeth Freeman". UC Davis. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
2. "Elizabeth Freeman". Critical Inquiry. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
3. Freeman, E. S. (1996). The wedding complex: Sex norms and fantasy forms in modern american culture (Order No. 9636786). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (304279511).
4. "Elizabeth Freeman". Wolf Humanities Center. October 30, 2014.
5. Brogan, Jacob (2017-12-03). "How Does a Queer Theorist Work?". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2023-05-14.
6. "Queer Kinship by Tyler Bradway & Elizabeth Freeman (Paperback)". Queer Lit. Retrieved 2023-05-14.
7. Press, Duke University (2015-01-22). "Congratulations to Foerster Prize Winners!". Duke University Press News. Retrieved 2024-06-03.
8. ^ Sell, Laura (2024-06-03). "Farewell to Elizabeth Freeman". Duke University Press News. Retrieved 2024-06-03.
9. Montgomery, Ry (May 17, 2023). "Book Review: Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman". LSE Review of Books.
10. Brogan, Jacob (December 3, 2017). "How Does a Queer Theorist Work?". Slate (magazine).
11. ^ "Critical Theory - Elizabeth Freeman". crittheory.ucdavis.edu. UC Davis. Retrieved November 7, 2024.

External links

• Elizabeth Freeman publications indexed by Google Scholar

• 1966 births
• 2024 deaths
• Sarah Lawrence College faculty
• University of California, Davis faculty
• University of Chicago alumni
• Oberlin College alumni
• American university and college faculty deans
• American women non-fiction writers
• Queer theorists