David Halperin, professor of English at the University of Michigan, will deliver the annual Fales Lecture at New York University on Monday, March 25, 6:30 p.m. Entitled “Mommie Queerest: Joan Crawford and Gay Male Subjectivity,” the lecture will be presented at the NYU Bobst Library, Fales Collection, 70 Washington Square. The event is free and open to the public; for further information call (212) 998-2596.
Dr. Halperin is an internationally recognized expert on classical poetry and the work of Michel Foucault. Over the past 15 years he has been one of the leading scholars working in the field of lesbian and gay studies an area in which NYU has become renowned. He is the author of Before Pastoral, Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love.
This event is cosponsored by the NYU Department of English and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the first center of its kind in the United States.
The Fales Collection is the rare book repository of NYU’s Bobst Library. It contains more than 200,000 volumes and 5,000 feet of archives. The collection was given to NYU in 1975 by DeCoursey Fales in memory of his father. Its outstanding holdings include first editions of English novels, collections of materials related to Robert Frost and Lewis Carroll, and the papers of numerous other writers. Its Downtown Collection documents the New York art scene from 1975 to the present.