Lauren Berlant

is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her books include: Desire/Love (Punctum, 2012); Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), The Female Complaint (Duke UP, 2008), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke UP, 1997), Intimacy, ed. (2000); Compassion, ed. (Routledge, 2004), The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago, 1991); and, most recently, with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Duke UP, 2014). She blogs at Supervalent Thought.