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James Robert Brudner '83 Memorial Prize and Lectures
The Brudner prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people. The Brudner prizewinner gives a Prize Lecture at Yale. The prize comes with an award of $5,000.
Justice Edwin Cameron, the 2009-10 recipient of the Brudner Prize, will deliver two prize lectures:
LGBTI Rights Around the World: Toward A Framework for Global Action
Wednesday, October 28, at 5 pm at the Yale Law School, room 127. Followed by a reception.
Africa, AIDS, and Homophobia: The Other Epidemic
Thursday, October 29, reception at 6 pm and lecture at 7 pm, at the Yale Club of New York, 50 Vanderbilt Avenue on the corner of 44th Street, across the street from Grand Central Station.
Registration for the reception at the Yale Club is $20.00 in advance, $30.00 at the door.
Introduction by Graeme Reid, Lecturer in LGBT Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology, Yale University.
Edwin Cameron is a Justice of the Constitutional Court, South Africa’s highest court, as well as a human rights lawyer, an author, and a Rhodes Scholar. Before serving as a judge in the Supreme Court of Appeal from 2000 to 2008, his legal practice included labor and employment law; defense of ANC fighters charged with treason; conscientious and religious objection; land tenure and forced removals; and gay and lesbian equality. He drafted the Charter of Rights on AIDS and HIV, co-founded the AIDS Consortium (a national affiliation of non-governmental organizations working in AIDS), which he chaired for its first three years, and founded and was the first director of the AIDS Law Project. He oversaw the gay and lesbian movement’s submissions to the committee drafting a new South African constitution, in the course of whose deliberations he delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, entitled "Sexual Orientation and the Constitution: A Test Case for Human Rights," which, with other work, was influential in securing the express inclusion of sexual orientation in the South African Constitution. He is co-author of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa (1994) and of scholarly articles on AIDS, HIV, and the legal rights of gays and lesbians, among other issues. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s Excellence in Leadership Award for 2003, and South Africa's most distinguished literary award for non-fiction for his memoir, Witness to AIDS (2005). In October 2003 he was elected an honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
James Robert Brudner '83 was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, and photographer. A man of wit and compassion, outsized knowledge and curiosity, Jim valued both academic inquiry and direct action. He spent 12 years as a policy analyst for the City of New York. He also earned an MA in journalism from New York University and wrote for various publications on gay- and AIDS-related topics. Jim became a member of ACT UP, the Treatment Action Group, and other organizations after the death of his twin brother, Eric, of AIDS in 1987. He worked on treatment and prevention issues with the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical corporations, and federal agencies. In his final years he devoted much of his time to traveling the back roads of rural America with a camera. La Mama Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of his photographs in 1997. Jim died of AIDS-related illness on September 18, 1998 at the age of 37. Through his will, he established the Brudner Prize at Yale as "a perpetual annual prize" for scholarship and activism on gay and lesbian issues.
Recipients of the Brudner Prize:
2000 George Chauncey
2001 Lillian Faderman
2002 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2003 Jonathan Ned Katz
2004 Judith Butler
2005 John D'Emilio
2006 Matt Coles
2007 B. Ruby Rich
2008 Didier Eribon
2008-2009 Cathy Cohen
2009-2010 Edwin Cameron
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