Henry D. Abelove

Henry D. Abelove
Born	1945 Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Scholar, literary analyst, professor
Years active	1970s–2012 (retired)
Known for	Expertise in contemporary history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory
Notable work	The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists; Deep Gossip; The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

Henry D. Abelove is an American scholar and literary analyst with expertise in the contemporary history of sexuality. He has played a significant role in the advancement of gay and lesbian studies as well as queer theory. Among his prominent publications are The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford University Press, 1990), Deep Gossip (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993), which he co-edited alongside Michele Aina Barale and David Halperin. This anthology was instrumental in shaping gay and lesbian studies into recognized academic disciplines through its foundational teaching materials.

Early life

Abelove was born in 1945 in Montgomery, Alabama to Bernice Kasover Abelove, a homemaker, and Leo Abelove, who worked as a grocer. During his childhood, he moved to Utica, New York. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude with an A.B. in history in 1966. Subsequently, he obtained his PhD in history from Yale University in 1978.

Career

The majority of Abelove’s professional tenure was at Wesleyan University located in Middletown, Connecticut. Initially part of the history department, he shifted to the English department in 1991 and retired there in 2012. He served two terms as director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities (2000–03 and 2004–06). His teaching spanned a range of topics such as queer theory, Jewish diaspora history, Thoreau's Walden, the Enlightenment era, and the poetry and politics of twentieth-century New York. In recognition of his teaching excellence, he received Wesleyan’s Binswanger Award in 1995.

Abelove has held several visiting positions including associate professor of history at Brown University in 1990; distinguished visiting professor of English at the University of Alberta in 1995; Stanley Kelly, Jr. Visiting Professor at Princeton University during 2003–04; Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Antwerp in 2008; visiting professor of English at New York University in 2012; and was appointed as the inaugural F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Sex and Gender at Harvard University, marking the first endowed chair dedicated to LGBT studies in the United States.

He has been awarded fellowships from prestigious organizations such as the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Danforth Foundation, Humanities Center at University of Utah, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University. The anthology The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader earned the Lambda Literary Prize in 2004.

Personal life

As an openly gay man engaged in queer activism, Abelove was honored with the Michael Lynch Service Prize for Activism in Queer Studies Scholarship in 2008. He currently lives in New York City and has a younger sister residing in Maryland.

Books

• Deep Gossip (University of Minnesota Press, 2003; paperback edition, 2005)
• The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, co-edited with Michele Aina Barale and David Halperin (Routledge, 1993)
• The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford University Press, 1990; paperback edition, 1992)
• Visions of History, edited with Elizabeth Blackmar, Peter Dimock, and Jonathan Schneer (Pantheon, 1983; University of Manchester Press, 1984)

Essays

• "'Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans' Reexamined," Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016
• "How Stonewall Masks the True History of Gay Liberation," The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 26, 2015)
• "The Bar and the Board: A Tribute to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick," GLQ Vol. 17, no. 4, 2011
• "A Remedy for Empire," Raritan (Summer 2010)
• "Yankee Doodle Dandy," Massachusetts Review, Spring/Summer 2008
• "John Wesley’s Appropriation of Samuel Johnson," Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1997)
• "Queering Lesbian/Gay History," Radical History Review no. 62 (Spring 1995)
• "The Politics Surrounding the 'Gay Plague': AIDS as an Ideological Construct in the U.S.," in Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon, eds., Body Politics (Westview Press, 1994)
• "From Thoreau to Queer Political Thought," Yale Journal of Criticism, VI, no. 2 (1993)
• "Reflections on the History of Sexual Intercourse in England During the Extended Eighteenth Century," Genders, VI (1989) [reprinted in various anthologies]
• "Sexual Politics in Early Wesleyan Methodism," in Disciplines of Faith: Religion, Patriarchy, and Politics (Routledge, 1987)
• "Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans," Dissent (1985–1986) [translated and reprinted internationally]
• Numerous additional essays on sexuality and history published from 1972 through 1984.