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Elizabeth Freeman Associate Professor of English

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1996
M.A., University of Chicago, 1991
B.A. with Highest Honors in English, Oberlin College, 1989

Elizabeth Freeman began her teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College, coming to UC Davis in 2000. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was entitled The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke UP, 2002), and she is currently working on a book about queer temporalities and untimely sexualities.

Publication Spotlight

The Wedding Complex by Elizabeth Freeman The Wedding Complex argues that whereas state-sanctioned marriage limits social interdependency to the couple-form, the wedding contains the historical residue of much broader visions of kinship. Focusing on weddings that fail to achieve the legal status of marriage in literature, film, television, and interactive theater, TWC traces how the various institutions that have controlled marriage appear in various parts of the ceremony to disrupt its coherence and to signal forms of affiliation that go beyond the conjugal dyad. In light of these historically lost possibilities, TWC argues that while same-sex marriage certainly ought to be available to gays and lesbians if it is available to heterosexuals, the national LGBT movement's focus on marriage obscures the economically and socially privatizing function of the marital institution, and renders queer social formations ever more illegible.

• University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2006-2007
• Chancellor's Fellowship, University of California, Davis, 2005-2009
• Consortium for Women and Research Academic Senate Project Grant, UCD, 2004
• Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Grants, UCD 2004, 2002, 2001
• Small Grant in Aid of Research, UCD, 2004-05
• Faculty Research Grants, UCD, 2003-04, 2002-03, 2001-02, 2001
• Dean's Publication Fund Grant, 2001-02
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Penn Humanities Forum, 1999-2000
• Mellon Dissertation Award, University of Chicago, (declined),1995 -96
• Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1990-95
• Florence May Snell Fellowship for Graduate Study, Oberlin College, 1988-92
• Phi Beta Kappa, Zeta Chapter of Ohio, 1988

• Time Binds: Essays on Queer Temporality. Book manuscript in progress.
• The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Duke University Press, 2002.
• Editor of Queer Temporalities, special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian Gay Studies, forthcoming 2007.
• "Still After." Solicited essay, in press. South Atlantic Quarterly special issue, "After Sex," eds. Andrew Parker and Janet Halley (forthcoming 2007).
• "Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory." Solicited essay, in production. A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, eds. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Blackwell Press, forthcoming 2007).
• "Monsters, Inc.: Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education." Solicited essay, New Literary History, 36.1, special issue, "Essays in the Humanities." (Winter 2005): 83-96.
• "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography." Social Text #84-85 special issue, The New Queer Theory (October 2005): 57-68.
• "The Whole(y) Family: Economies of Kinship in the Progressive Era." American Literary History 16.4 (Winter 2004): 619-47.
• "Queer Bonds." Concerns 27 (Winter 2000): 21-37.
• "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations." New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000): 727-44.
• "Teaching Outside the Curriculum: Guerrilla Sex Education and the Public Schools." Coauthored with Anne-Elizabeth Murdy and Scott Mendel. Radical Teacher 45 (Summer, 1994): 17-19.
• " 'What Factory Girls Had Power to Do' : The Techno-logic of Working Class Feminine Publicity in the Lowell Offering." Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (Summer, 1994): 109-128
• "Queer Nationality." Coauthored with Lauren Berlant. Boundary 2 (Spring 1992): 149-80.Reprinted in Fear of a Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) : 193-229.