Elizabeth Freeman

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. She has written three books,  The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Duke UP, 2002), Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke UP, 2010), and Beside You in Time: Sense-Methods and Queer Sociabilities in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2019).  She was also the editor of a special issue of GLQ, "Queer Temporalities" (2007), and co-editor (with Ellen Samuels, U Wisconsin, Madison), of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, "Crip Temporalities" (2021).  Between 2011 and 2017, she served as Co-Editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.  She is currently working on a book project examining the reading practices accompanying care work and a co-edited anthology, "Queer Kinship" (with Tyler Bradway, SUNY Cortland).  

Publication Spotlight

Beside You in Time

In Beside You in Time Elizabeth Freeman expands biopolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discipline as a regime that yoked the human body to time, Freeman shows how time became a social and sensory means by which people assembled into groups in ways that resisted disciplinary forces. She tracks temporalized bodies across many entangled regimes—religion, secularity, race, historiography, health, and sexuality—and examines how those bodies act in relation to those regimes. In analyses of the use of rhythmic dance by the Shakers; African American slave narratives; literature by Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Herman Melville, and others; and how Catholic sacraments conjoined people across historical boundaries, Freeman makes the case for the body as an instrument of what she calls queer hypersociality. As a mode of being in which bodies are connected to others and their histories across and throughout time, queer hypersociality, Freeman contends, provides the means for subjugated bodies to escape disciplinary regimes of time and to create new social worlds.

Honors and Awards

• Lambda Literary Award Finalist in LGBT Studies for Beside You In Time, 2020
• TOME Open Access Grant for Beside You in Time, UC Davis, 2018
• ACLS Fellowship, 2015-16
• Norman Foerster Award for Best Essay in American Literature, 2014
• UC Davis Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award, 2013
• 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 Grants in Aid of Research, UCD, 2005-present
• Faculty Research Grants, UCD, 2003-04, 2002-03, 2001-02, 2001
• Dean's Publication Fund Grant, 2018-19, 2008-09, 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

Publications

Books

• Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century, Duke University Press 2019
• Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press 2010.
• The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture. Duke University Press, 2002.

Edited Collections

• Co-Editor (with Tyler Bradway) of Queer Kinship: Erotic Affinities and the Politics of Belonging, under contract at Duke University Press.
• Co-Editor (with Ellen Samuels) of Crip Temporalities, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2021)
• Editor of Queer Temporalities, special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian Gay Studies 13.2/3 (Winter/Spring 2007).

Articles

• "The Book of Love is Long and Boring: Reading Aloud, Care Work, and Children's Literature." Solicited for Russ Castronovo and Leslie Bow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature.  In contract with Oxford University Press
• “Committed to the End: On Caretaking, Rereading, and Queer Theory.”   Solicited for Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, eds., Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment.  In contract with Duke University Press.
• "Shakers, Not Movers: The Physiopolitics of Shaker Dance."  In Cindy Weinstein, ed. A Question of Time : From Colonial Encounter to Contemporary Fiction.  Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• "Afterward."  In Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies, ed. Kent Brintnall and Joseph Marchal.  Fordham University Press,  2017.
• "Timing Sex in the Age of Digital Reproduction." Special Issue of New Formations, "Timing TransFormations."  2017.
• “Synchronic/Anachronic.” In Joel Burges and Amy Elias, eds. Time: a Vocabulary of the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2016).
• “Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha.’” Journal of Homosexuality 63.3 (2016): 329-348.
• “Sacramentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” American Literature, special issue on “After the Post-Secular,” eds. Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman, 2014.  Winner of the 2014 Norman Foerster Prize for best essay in American Literature.
• “Connecticut Yankings: Mark Twain and the Masturbating Dude.” Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson, eds., Unsettled States: Nineteenth Century American Literary Studies (NYU Press, 2014).
• Response to Social Text Periscope online dossier on Time Binds,http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/time_binds/, July 2014.
• “The Chronic: Renate Lorenz in Conversation with Mathias Danbolt and Elizabeth Freeman” (in German), Springerin 1 (Winter 2014): 17-23. 
• “Lessons from Object Lessons.”  Feminist Formations 25.3 (December 2013). 
• “Never the Usual Terms: A Song for 21^st Century Occupations,” written with Peter Coviello,Social Text Periscope online dossier on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,”http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_topic/work-and-idleness-in-the-age-of-the-great-recession/, February 2013.
• “Normal Work: Temporal Drag and the Question of Class.”  Catalogue essay for Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Temporal Drag (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 1976-1980.
• “Reimagining Gender and Sexuality,” The Cambridge History of the American Novel(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).
• “Sacramentality and the Lesbian Premodern,” in The Lesbian Premodern, eds. Noreen Giffneyet. al.  (Palgrave Macmillan, New Middle Ages Series, 2011).
• “We’re Only Making Plans for Nigel.  In Response to Didier Eribon.”  Qui Parle 18.2 (2010), 323-27.
• “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History.” differences 19.1 (2008): 32-70.
• "Still After." South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3, special issue, "After Sex," eds. Andrew Parker and Janet Halley (Summer 2007).
• "Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory." A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, eds. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Blackwell Press, 2007), 295-314.
• "Monsters, Inc.: Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education." 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 History16.4 (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.
• “Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov.” American Literature 70.1 (December 1998): 109-154.
• “‘The We of Me’: The Member of the Wedding’s Novel Alliances.” Women and Performance 8.2 (1996): 111-135.
• "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.

Email:  esfreeman@ucdavis.edu