David M Halperin

Early life and education

David Halperin was born on April 2, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1973, having studied abroad at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in 1972–1973. He received his PhD in Classics and Humanities from Stanford University in 1980.

Career

In 1977, he served as Associate Director of the Summer Session of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. From 1981 to 1996, he served as Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1994, he taught at the University of Queensland, and in 1995 at Monash University. From 1996 to 1999, he was a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New South Wales. He is currently W. H. Auden Distinguished University Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of English, women’s studies, comparative literature, and classical studies.

In 1991, he co-founded the academic journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and served as its editor until 2006. His work has been published in the Journal of Bisexuality, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Journal of Homosexuality, Michigan Feminist Studies, Michigan Quarterly Review, Representations, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Ex Aequo, UNSW Tharunka, Australian Humanities Review, Sydney Star Observer, The UTS Review, Salmagundi, Blueboy, History and Theory, Diacritics, American Journal of Philology, Classical Antiquity, Ancient Philosophy, Yale Review, Critical Enquiry, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Notes & Queries, London Review of Books, Journal of Japanese Studies, Partisan Review, and Classical Journal.

He has been a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, as well as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. In 2008–2009, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay and Lesbian Caucus at the Modern Language Association, as well as the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. In 2011–2012, he received the Brudner Prize at Yale University.

Halperin is openly gay. In 1990, he launched a campaign to oppose the presence of the ROTC on the MIT campus, on the grounds that it discriminated against gay and lesbian students. That same year, he received death threats for his gay activism. In 2003, the Michigan chapter of the American Family Association tried to ban his course 'How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.' In 2010, he wrote an open letter to Michigan's 52nd Attorney General Mike Cox to denounce the homophobic harassment by one of the latter's staffers, Andrew Shirvell, of a University of Michigan student, Chris Armstrong.

Genealogy of homosexuality

Halperin uses the method of genealogy to study the history of homosexuality. He argues that Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium does not indicate a "taxonomy" of heterosexuals and homosexuals comparable to modern ones. Medieval historian John Boswell has criticized Halperin's arguments.

One Hundred Years of Homosexuality

Halperin's book was published in 1990, two years before the centenary of Charles Gilbert Chaddock's English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psycopathia sexuallis. Chaddock is credited with the first use of the term "homosexual" in this translation. Halperin believes that the introduction of this term marks an important change in the treatment and consideration of homosexuality. The book collects six essays by the author. The first essay gives the book its title.

Accusations of plagiarism

Didier Eribon demanded that his name be withdrawn as a recipient of the Brudner prize because he did not want to be associated with Halperin, who won the Brudner for his book What Do Gay Men Want? and who Eribon accused of plagiarizing Eribon's work, Une morale du minoritaire. According to L'Express in 2011, Halperin had not yet responded to Eribon's claims.

Publications