Exciting new faculty pub on Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom

Cover to Closures depicting a sitcom couple from the 1980s and 1990s.To my delight, I get to announce that Prof. Grace Lavery has a new book titled Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom (cover figured here).

At UC Berkeley, Lavery teaches courses (course catalog) on topics such as “Literature and Popular Culture” as well as special topics courses and research seminars examining representations of sex, sexuality, and gender.

Lavery’s new book is a phenomenal study looking at the idea of heterosexuality in the U.S. American sitcom. More specifically, the book “reconsiders the seven-decade history of the American sitcom to show how its reliance on crisis and resolution in each episode creates doubts and ambivalence that depicts heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse and reconstitution.”

You can access and download the book online through the UC Library Search.


Prof. Elizabeth Abel Talks Odd Affinities and Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts (website) got there first, nonetheless I’m thrilled to share the news that Prof. Elizabeth Abel released Odd Affinities : Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies with the University of Chicago Press this year.

cover of odd affinities with a black and white image of Virginia Woolf sitting, looking wistfully at the camera.
Abel’s Odd Affinities (2024).

Prof. Abel (faculty page) teaches with the UC Berkeley English Department. They teach courses on Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group as well as broader overviews of 19th and 20th century English literatures. This fall, they are leading courses “Memoir and Memory” as well as on graduate readings and special study.

In Odd Affinities, Prof. Abel discusses Woolf’s influence beyond a female tradition, looking at echoes of Woolf work in four major writers from diverse cultural contexts: Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald. Looking at those “odd affinities,” Abel looks at how “Woolf’s career and the transnational modernist genealogy was constituted by her elusive and shifting presence.”

You can access Abel’s book through the UC Library Search, where you can access it online and download the fulltext.