JONATHAN GOLDBERG

GOLDBERG--Jonathan. Jonathan Goldberg, beloved and inspiring scholar, teacher, mentor, family member, and colleague, died of complications of pneumonia in Decatur, GA, on December 9, 2022. The author of seventeen monographs, most recently "Being of Two Minds," Goldberg was for many years a towering presence in the fields of early modern British literature, poststructuralist literary studies, and LGBTQ studies and queer theory. He made a unique contribution to the integration of these fields through work that called into question the boundaries that ostensibly separated them. Throughout his career, he produced innovative work on the persistence and transformation of the writing of such authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne, exploring the reception of their work in such places as twentieth-century Caribbean writing and, most recently, in the writing of emblematic modernists such as Virginia Woolf, William Empson, and T.S. Eliot. In the 1990s, Goldberg's work came to be centrally informed by queer theory, an understanding of sexuality shaped by the post-structuralist and post- Freudian theories of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, and invested in the critique of patriarchy developed by feminism, and the critique of racism found in post-colonial theory. Rather than trying to establish a lineage of homosexual forebears, the work insisted on the political and cultural urgency of queer visibility, especially in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the 1986 Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick upholding the criminality of sodomy. Goldberg's scholarly work came to range widely across media. He published substantive accounts of the work of Lucretius, Saint Mark, and Tintoretto, women writers including Sappho, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and filmmakers including Hitchcock, Sirk, Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes. He was a founding co-editor of the influential book series Series Q (Duke University Press) and edited the journal English Literary History (ELH) 2001-2006. He also edited Sedgwick's posthumous "The Weather in Proust" (2011). He co-edited with Stephen Orgel the volume of John Milton's writing for the Oxford Authors series (1990). Colleagues and former dissertation students of Goldberg's organized a 2012 conference in his honor at Brown University entitled, "Writing Sex and Other Matters with Jonathan Goldberg," which resulted in an edited volume, "This Distracted Globe" (2016), about the worldmaking powers of contemporary scholarship on early modern literature. At the time of his death, Goldberg held the position of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Emory University. He previously taught at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature. He also held positions at Temple, Brown, and Duke Universities. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University, and was a 1984 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Born in Kew Gardens, Queens, on June 11, 1943, Goldberg is survived by Michael Moon, his partner of 38 years, his brother Franklin Goldberg of Ambler, PA, and Tucson, AZ, and two daughters, Julia Goldberg of Santa Fe, NM and Abigail Goldberg of Palm Springs, CA.