Heather Love Appointed the R. Jean Brownlee Term Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences
Heather Love has been appointed to the R. Jean Brownlee Term Chair in the School of Arts and Sciences. She had previously served as the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professor in the Humanities. Professor Love studies late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature, with research interests that include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, sociology and literature, disability studies and critical theory.
Dr. Love is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History and the editor of a special issue of GLQ featuring the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin. She is also the co-editor of an issue of New Literary History. She has recent and forthcoming essays on description as method in literary studies and the social sciences, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics and comparative social stigma. She is currently working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive"). In 2006 she received the SAS Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.
The R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professorship was established through a gift from the McLean Contributorship under the direction of Mr. and Mrs. William McLean, III. The McLeans established the endowed term chair in recognition of Dr. Jean Brownlee’s years of service to the Contributorship and to Penn and to honor their lifelong friendship with her. Dr. Brownlee earned her doctorate from Penn in political science in 1942 and returned in 1947 as an assistant professor of political science. She was named acting dean in 1958 and, a year later, dean.
