Cedar Lensing-Sharp

Cedar Lensing-Sharp’s research and teaching focus on literary, medical, and historical formations of queer desire and non-normative gender identities in German and French literature. They hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and German Studies from Smith College. Their book manuscript, tentatively titled Erotic Epistemologies: Knowledge Production in Lesbian Novels Against Sexology, investigates modes of narrating and theorizing female homosexuality in German and French sexology and lesbian novels around the turn of the 20th century. Cedar is editor of a forthcoming special issue of Colloquia Germanica titled “The State of Trans* in German Studies,” and their essay “Erotic Pedagogy, Power Play, and Suspended Pleasure in Mädchen in Uniform” will be published in Weimar’s Queer Visual Cultures, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. At UCLA, Cedar teaches courses in queer and trans German literature, women’s writing, German film, and German language.