Reparative Craft: Jason Edwards in conversation with Monica Pearl
Event details
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is primarily known for her foundational work in queer and affect theory, but her artistic work with textiles remains largely unexplored. In Reparative Craft, Jason Edwards will discuss, with Dr Monica Pearl (University of Manchester), one of Sedgwick's first students, a range of Eve's textile art from a ten-year period in which she was also writing her perhaps most influential book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (c.1996-2005). Employing a reparative approach that Sedgwick pioneered, eschewing all forms of criticism, and analyzing her four exhibitions, of patchworks and weavings, Jason will suggest the necessity of connecting Sedgwick’s fibre art practice to her work as a theorist; will think about the Buddhist sources of her work; will argue for her centrality to the emerging categories of queer and sloppy craft; and will think about the efficacy of returning to amateur craft practice with all the loving attention one can muster.
Prof Jason Edwards
Jason is a professor of art history at the University of York, where he works mostly on visual and material culture in South Asia, and British Asia more broadly, from 1526, with the arrival of the Mughals, to Partition in 1947.
He is the author of the Routledge Critical Thinkers volume on American poet, queer theorist, and artist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2006), the editor of her uncollected poetry, Bathroom Songs (2017) and the author of two books about her: Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist (2022) and Reparative Craft: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Textile Artist (2026).
Dr Monica Pearl
Monica Pearl is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. She has written extensively on AIDS and HIV representation, including her book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss (Routledge, 2013). Her writing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick includes the essay "Queer Therapy," which can be found in Jason Edwards' edited collection Bathroom Songs. Her book “Where Is Your Rage?”: American Culture Looks Back at the AIDS Crisis is forthcoming from Punctum Books. For further details, see www.monicapearl.com.
Image: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at Penland School of Craft, ca. 1996–99. Photograph by Kevin Ryan. Collection of H. A. Sedgwick. © H. A. Sedgwick.
Please contact Michael White (michael.white@york.ac.uk) or Ivan Knapp (ivan.knapp@york.ac.uk) if you have any questions. View the full schedule for the semester.