Way back in 2009, five years after its publication, we discussed George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. I still consult that seminal work from time to time, and highly recommend it. So I was pleased to read in the New York Times that the Library of Congress has named Chauncey this year's winner of the Kluge Humanities Prize, making him the first scholar in LGBT studies to be so honored. The award, which is conferred every two years and comes with a $500,000 prize, is intended to recognize scholarship that resonates both inside and outside academia.
Chauncey, a professor of American history at Columbia University, where he is the director of the school's Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities, intends to use the prize to collaborate with the library's historians and curators on its AIDS Memorial Quilt archive collection. He notes that he was inspired to enter the field of LGBTQ history through the research of other suppressed groups: "Debates over who should be included in history are really often about who do we think should be included in American society today. Who should be respected in American society today? And to establish black history or women's history or LGBTQ history as a vibrant and respected field of historical scholarship is to lay a claim on the present as well as the past."
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