The 2011 James Robert Brudner '83 Memorial Prize and Lecture

Thursday, October 6

6pm - Reception

7pm - Lecture

Yale Club of NYC, 50 Vanderbilt Avenue

Early Bird $20 until October 4; $30 at the door

The Brudner prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people. The Brudner prizewinner gives a Prize Lecture at Yale. The prize comes with an award of $5,000.

The faculty Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at Yale is pleased to announce that David M. Halperin is the 2011-12 recipient of the Brudner Prize, will deliver two prize lectures in the fall; one on the Yale campus, October 5th, and one at the Yale Club of New York City, October 6th. 

David M. Halperin, is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality, teaches English, Women's Studies, Comparative Literature, and Classical Studies.  He is a classicist by training; his early publications were on Hellenistic Greek poetics and ancient Greek philosophy. He currently works in the history of sexuality, lesbian and gay studies, and feminist and queer theory, and he has played a role in the institutionalization of queer studies within the academy. He is the author or editor of eight books, including One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Saint Foucault, How To Do the History of Homosexuality,  and Gay Shame.  Among his courses is the notorious "How to be Gay:  Male Homosexuality and Initiation," which examines gay male sexuality and identity from the perspective not of sex but of social practices and cultural identifications, and is the topic of his forthcoming book of the same title.   

James Robert Brudner '83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer. A man of wit and compassion, outsized knowledge and curiosity, Jim valued both academic inquiry and direct action. He spent 12 years as a policy analyst for the City of New York. He also earned an MA in journalism from New York University and wrote for various publications on gay- and AIDS-related topics. Jim became a member of ACT UP, the Treatment Action Group, and other organizations after the death of his twin brother, Eric, of AIDS in 1987. He worked on treatment and prevention issues with the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical corporations, and federal agencies. In his final years he devoted much of his time to traveling the back roads of rural America with a camera. La Mama Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of his photographs in 1997. Jim died of AIDS-related illness on September 18, 1998 at the age of 37. Through his will, he established the Brudner Prize at Yale as "a perpetual annual prize" for scholarship and activism on gay and lesbian issues.