The Kessler Award is given to a scholar who has produced a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies. Join us on Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 6:30 PM for the Kessler Lecture, which will feature remarks and tributes from John Keene, Dagmawi Woubshet, and Debarati Biswas. Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.A. in African American Studies from Yale University as well as a B.A. (with honors) in Political Science from UNC, Chapel Hill. He has been the Cloud Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, the Edward Said Visiting Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Drue Heinz Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oxford, the Carlisle and Barbara Moore Distinguished Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and the Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. His research and writing have been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His books include: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique, 2016; Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual, 2007; Black Gay Man: Essays, 2001; and Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American, 1999. His essays have appeared in The Minnesota Review; Humanities Magazine; Texte Zur Kunst; James Baldwin Review; Callaloo; Art in America; American Literary History; American Literature; Small Axe; The Chronicle of Higher Education; Social Text; Transition; Studies in the Novel; and the African American Review, among many other places. He lives in Brooklyn.