Join CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, in honoring Dr. David L. Eng, our 2021 annual Kessler Award recipient. The Kessler Award is given every year to a scholar and/ or activist who has produced a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies.

Please join us for what will be an extraordinary lecture, “(Gay) Panic Attack,” given by Dr. Eng prior the acceptance of the award.

Testimonial speakers:

• Judith Butler
• Jasbir K. Puar
• Ava L.J. Kim

2021 Kessler Award Winner

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Professor in the Program in Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. His areas of specialization include American studies, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, queer studies, and visual culture. After receiving his B.A. in English from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley, he taught at Columbia and Rutgers before joining Penn in 2007. Eng has held visiting professorships at the University of Bergen (Norway), King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. Eng is a former Chair of the Board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies as well as a former member of the Board of Directors of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. In 2016, Eng was elected an honorary member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City.

Eng is author of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke, 2019, winner of the Boyer Book Prize and Association for Asian American Studies Book Award Honorable Mention), The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010), and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001). He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Association of Asian American Studies Book Award). In addition, he is co-editor of three special issues of the journal Social Text: with Jasbir Puar, “Left of Queer” (2020), with Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, “China and the Human” (2011/2012), and with Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005). His current book project, “Reparations and the Human,” investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia.

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