Heather Love, a professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences, has received the 2024 David R. Kessler Award from CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York. The honor goes to a scholar who has produced a “substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ studies.”

“Love’s engagements with comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies, as well as her current work on the queer real, exemplify a range and depth of scholarship that CLAGS is proud to honor,” the committee wrote.

Dr. Love is the 32nd recipient of the award.At a ceremony in her honor, she gave a lecture called “Intimacy and Infrastructure.” David Eng, the Richard L. Fisher Professor in English at Penn, was honored in 2021, and he gave a talk called “(Gay) Panic Attack.”