From 2002 to 2025, Cornell University Library offered Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grants to scholars researching sexuality with sources in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC). Through the generosity of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation, these grants fostered innovative and important new research from promising scholars, 95 projects in total.
Phil Zwickler, a filmmaker and journalist whose work advanced lesbian and gay rights and brought urgent attention to the AIDS crisis, died in 1991 at the age of 36. Documentation of his life and work is preserved in Cornell’s Human Sexuality Collection, an RMC program that seeks to encourage the study of sexuality and sexual politics. Collecting efforts focus especially on groups excluded from mainstream culture and, while we have items such as De amoris generibus, an Italian work on love and sex from 1492, the majority of our holdings on this subject come from the 19th century onward. Primary sources at Cornell include print, manuscripts, ephemera and garments, artwork, audio-visual and born-digital material from many of the leading LGBTQ organizations and individual movers and shakers in the United States, as well as substantial documents from around the world.
More about past Zwickler Research Grants. For more information, contact curator Brenda J. Marston at bjm4@cornell.edu, 607-255-3530, or at the address below.