Pleasure in the Past: Queer Nostalgia in the Gay American Century (original) (raw)

I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people, and I consider it a happy task to finally have the space and time to thank them properly. First among these, of course, is my advisor Anca Parvulescu. Her charm, kindness, wit, and intellect are unparalleled, and I am a better scholar because I have been able to study with her. She has taught me about pedagogy-about how much of good teaching is listening closely and listening well-and about scholarly style, both written and embodied. During the years I worked on this project, Anca's incisive questions about gender, modernism, cultural studies, critical theory, and a host of other things guided me to deeper and more complex thinking. She is exceptional at what she does, and she has been an exceptional advisor, colleague, and friend to me. I am fortunate to have had Bill Maxwell's guidance from the beginning. It was in a class with him that I discovered Richard Bruce Nugent, and this project was born. Bill's influence is all across this dissertation, and the dissertation is better for it. Vivian Pollak reignited my interest in Whitman, and encouraged the admittedly wacky questions I was asking about him and around him. Both personally and professionally, she has been enormously supportive of me over the past seven years, provided a model for agile and capacious thinking, and, perhaps most importantly, never failed to make me laugh. Melanie Micir offered exceptionally good advice at every stage of this project. I appreciate her attention to an embarrassingly early draft of chapter four, even while she was on leave. Conversations with Jeffrey McCune-and reading his field-defining work-have left chapter two in much better shape than it began. A class I audited with Amber Musser when I was deep into this dissertation reminded me why queer theory is important, and vi something. For most of the past two decades, Taylor has been my partner in life, and I've depended on his sometimes tough, often critical, always loving support all the way through.