American academic and writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was BOTD in 1950. Born Eve Kosovsky in Dayton, Ohio to a middle-class family, she was raised in Bethesda, Maryland. She studied English at Cornell University and Yale, teaching at Boston University and Amherst College. She became one of the leading exponents of the emerging discipline of queer theory. Her first book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, published in 1985 and drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault, explored homoerotic subtexts in the novels of Charles Dickens and Henry James. In 1988, she joined the newly-formed department of sexuality studies at Duke University, where she taught for over a decade. She horrified academic conservatives with her 1989 essay Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, argued that Austen’s descriptions of the restless Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility should be read in relation to 19th century concerns about the evils of “self-abuse.” In her best-known work, Epistemology of the Closet, a critical study of James, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, she argued that Western culture could be understood only by critically dissecting the socially constructed concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Her other publications included the essay collection Tendencies and Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Criticising what she called “paranoid reading” in academic writing, she advocated for “reparative reading”, in which critics should look at the “empowering, productive as well as renewing potential” of textual analysis “to promote semantic innovation, personal healing and social change.” A committed activist, she publicly critiqued the US government’s suppression of gay teenage suicide rates and the censorship of HIV/AIDS education. She married Hal Sedgwick in 1989, living apart and meeting at weekends as they separately pursued their academic careers. Some of Sedgwick’s readers found it anomalous that one of the pioneers of queer theory was heterosexual and married, though she was supported by queer-identifying scholars including Judith Butler. Sedgwick spent nearly 20 years being treated for breast cancer, addressing her fears about mortality and views on her gender identity post-mastectomy in the essay collection A Dialogue of Love. She died in 2009, aged 58. Her writings, particularly Epistemology of the Closet, are now considered foundational texts of queer theory, and are reading for most literature and gender studies courses.