Heather Love received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and her research interests include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, disability studies, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on the scholarship and legacy of Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She has recent and forthcoming essays on description as method in literary studies and the social sciences, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and comparative social stigma. She is working on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive").