Queer Ideas: The David R. Kessler Lectures from 1992-2001

An essential text documenting the foundation and rise of queer theory.

The David R. Kessler Lectures, established in 1992 by CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, represent the cutting edge of queer studies in the United States. Years before LGBTQ studies had found a foothold in American academia, the Kessler Lectures celebrated dynamic and diverse inquiries into queer thought, community, and politics.

Twenty years after its initial publication, Queer Ideas collects the first ten historic Kessler Lectures by influential scholars, writers, and activists including Cherríe Moraga, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith, with a new foreword by CLAGS Executive Director Matt Brim and Board Co-Chairs James Harris and Laura Westengard. Alongside the second volume, Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020, this revised edition of Queer Ideas traces the early foundations of the field and provides a new opportunity to revisit an essential collection of queer and trans thought.

The Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS), located at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, was founded in 1991 and is the first university-based research center in the United States dedicated to the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals and communities.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have taught in Critical Theory and Comparative Literature. They are the author of several books, which have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages, and the recipient of thirteen honorary degrees. Butler is active in several human rights organizations, having served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and presently on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), were elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2020, they served as President of the Modern Language Association. They are presently teaching as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the New School University.