People like Lauren Berlant

Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author. Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.

Berlant wrote on public spheres as they 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.

Berlant was born on October 31, 1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They graduated with a BA in English from Oberlin College in 1979, then an MA from Cornell University in 1983, and finally a PhD from Cornell in 1985, after they had already begun teaching at the University of Chicago. (They said student loans obliged them to continue straight through school without a break that would have triggered loan repayment.) Berlant's dissertation was titled, Executing The Love Plot: Hawthorne and The Romance of Power (1985).