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Heather K. Love

Professor of English

Curriculum Vitae

Fisher-Bennett Hall 338
215-898-0128

Office Hours

fall 2023

On leave in 2023-2024

Heather Love received her A.B. from Harvard and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press) and Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press). She is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor (with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus) of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). In 2023, she published Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, co-edited with James F. English (Oxford University Press). 

Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. She is currently at work on a new project ("To Be Real"), funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, concerning the uses of the personal in queer writing. 

Publications

News & Events

2018/09/13

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2021

Jess Shollenberger "Intimate Reception: Reading Ordinary Queerness in American Women's Literature"

2018

Joan Lubin "Social Science Fictions: The Numeric Imaginary of Cold War America "
Clare Mullaney "American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932 "

2017

Don James McLaughlin "Infectious Affect: The Phobic Imagination in American Literature"
Mary Zaborskis "Erotics of Education: Queering Children in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Boarding Schools"

2011

Lance Wahlert "The Clinical Gays and the Painful Reunion: Medical Spectatorship and Historiographical Practice in New Queer Cinema"

2010

Todd Carmody "Intentional Communities: The Public Life of Race in American Literature, 1925–1961"

Courses Taught

fall 2024

spring 2023

ENGL 0070.001 Literature and Medicine  

fall 2022

spring 2022

fall 2021

spring 2021

ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2020

spring 2019

ENGL 065.001 20th-Century British Novel canceled  
ENGL 790.401 Queer Method  

fall 2018

ENGL 290.401 The Modern Queer Novel  

spring 2016

fall 2015

ENGL 790.401 Queer Method  

spring 2014

fall 2013

fall 2012

ENGL 790.401 Queer Methods  

spring 2012

ENGL 390.401 Friendship  

fall 2011

ENGL 105.401 Disability Narratives  
ENGL 800.301 Pedagogy  

spring 2010

ENGL 105.401 Disability Narratives  

fall 2009

ENGL 016.401 Scenes of Teaching  
ENGL 799.401 Sociology and Literature  

spring 2009

ENGL 790.401 The Stigma Archive  

fall 2008

spring 2008

fall 2007

summer 2007

ENGL 261.950 Bloomsbury Experiments  

spring 2006

spring 2005

ENGL 801.302 Pedagogy  

fall 2004

spring 2004

ENGL 773.401 Affects of Modernity  

fall 2003

ENGL 065.001 20th Century British Novel  
ENGL 260.301 Theories of Sexuality