About the Symposium

“Honoring Eve” was a day of rich intellectual exchange that honored the memory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the “soft-spoken queen of gay studies,” the “‘primum mobile’ of queer theory,” and one of the most gifted writers of our time.  Eve taught at Boston University in the early 1980s and there are still many here who remember her from those years.  The symposium brought together 250 of her old friends and newer fans for a day of remembrance and celebration.

The symposium consisted of four roundtables with speakers responding to specific texts representing different phases and aspects of Professor Sedgwick’s career:

Feminism and Queer Theory
Writing and Illness
Affect and Reparative  Reading
Reading Proust

For details on texts and speakers, see the Panels and Speaker Bios pages.

The symposium ended with a special reading of “Writing the Plural,” a performance piece based on a group of short writings that Professor Sedgwick co-wrote with the collective ID 450, of which she was a founding member.

The proceedings of the symposium were published in the Spring 2010 issue of Criticism: A Quarterly Journal for the Arts (vol. 52, no. 2), available through Project Muse online.