Sexual Politics on Campus
Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other crevices of the American psyche. Her books include “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation,” “How to Become A Scandal,” and “Against Love: A Polemic;” among others. Her most recent book is “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” from HarperCollins. Her next book, “Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis,” will be published in February 2022 by Pantheon.
Kipnis is a professor emerita in the department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University where she teaches filmmaking. She has taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan, and has been a visiting professor at NYU, Columbia University School of the Arts, the University of British Columbia, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo; and has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, and New Left Review. Her essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” was included in "The Best American Essays 2016", edited by Jonathan Franzen; “Domestic Gulags” (from Against Love) is included in "The Contemporary American Essay," edited by Phillip Lopate.
Kipnis has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and she has attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program.
Professor Kipnis's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.
Adapted from http://laurakipnis.com/about/