Graduate Alum Wins MLA Award

Stephen Vider, who received his PhD from American Studies with a graduate secondary field in WGS, received the G/LQ Caucus' Crompton-Noll award at the 2015 Modern Language Association convention in Vancouver.

The award, which honors the year's best essay in lesbian, gay, queer studies in the modern languages/literatures, was presented to Vider for his December 2013 American Quarterly article "'Oh Hell, May, Why Don’t You People Have a Cookbook?': Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity." The awards committee called the article, " total joy to read," and said that it the essay "offers a rich and nuanced picture of the role played by food culture and camp humor in forging identity, social connections, and political consciousness across boundaries of private and public life before Stonewall."

Vider is currently in his second year as the inaugural Clay Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Sexuality at Yale University's Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.