Jeffrey Escoffier Memorial Fund

Brooklyn Institute and partner scholars are raising $10,000 to build and run a course, to take place in June 2023, dedicated to exploring the work of the remarkable queer theorist, intellectual historian, and BISR faculty Jeffrey Escoffier (1942-2022). Your donation will enable us to not only pay faculty, but also subsidize seats to ensure maximum accessibility for students of all income levels. Donations are fully tax-deductible.

About Jeffrey Escoffier

When Jeffrey Escoffier joined the BISR faculty in 2015, he was already well-established as a trailblazing public intellectual. From editorial perches at Socialist Review and OUT/LOOK magazine, he helped shepherd into print lasting work by such authors as Barbara Ehrenreich, Winona LaDuke, Howard Winant, and Donna Haraway. And in his own capacity as a writer, he published on everything from John Maynard Keynes to the American LGBT movement (American Homo: Community and Perversity (Verso)) to the aesthetics and social significance of pornography (Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge (Rutgers)). At BISR, Jeffrey taught courses on the Sexual Revolution (asking, is sexual liberation possible?), Herbert Marcuse, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s mammoth Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A wonderful scholar, he was also, as so many people can attest, a wonderful person—kind, generous, thoughtful, open.

In honor of Jeffrey, BISR and partner scholars and friends are organizing a course dedicated to amplifying, contextualizing, and closely studying Jeffrey’s work on queer sexuality, biopolitics, pornography, dance, and beyond. With your support, we can achieve our $10,000 goal, enabling us to fairly compensate faculty while offering the course at a highly reduced cost. To donate: