Lauren Berlant

George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She explores how modes of social membership flourish and preserve critical and optimistic attachments to the political as a site of collective ongoingness or potentiality. Author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991); The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2009); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and Cruel Optimism (2011). As well as edited volumes Intimacy (2000); Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (with Lisa Duggan 2001); and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).