Audrey Bilger

The inside story of the ceramic hearts that beckon from trees around campus. Perhaps you’ve seen them around campus: ceramic hearts, bright red, dangling from the arms of trees, glinting in the elusive sunlight. Reminders of love and loved ones that are perhaps more precious than ever right now as the global pandemic continues to disconnect us from one another. The secret agents behind this festoonery? President Audrey Bilger and her wife, Cheryl Pawelski. “Love is a superpower,” Bilger says.

There was no script for Audrey Bilger’s career. So she wrote her own.

“College presidents have been described as the ‘narrators-in-chief’ of their institutions,” said University of Virginia alumna Audrey Bilger, who this summer will become the 16th president of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the first woman to serve in that role. “My background as a scholar of literature and teacher in the classroom will be of enormous assistance to me in telling the impressive story of Reed College,” Bilger wrote in email from the West Coast, where she has mostly lived an

Interviewed by Tyler Sonnemaker.

By Ted Scheinman. Bookish joke-accounts—and the serious people behind them. By Ted Scheinman. CASSANDRA AUSTEN IS A decidedly less political presence on Twitter (@AustenWomen). Cass is the genial brainchild of Audrey Bilger, professor of literature at Claremont-McKenna College, who created the account in 2010 after a brainstorming session with writer and photographer Lisa Jane Persky.

By Steven Petrow. Audrey Bilger, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College and an editor of “Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage,” said that gays and lesbians “grow up with the same movies, go to the same rituals as straight people, and when we want to commit to one another it’s not surprising that we would choose the same forms.” “We’re claiming the right to equal citizenship — to dream the same dream as straight people,” she said. “That’s a big deal.”

Interviewed by K. Bradford

A new book co-edited by CMC's Associate Professor of Literature Audrey Bilger gives "a snapshot of the time we're living in," and tells the stories of lesbians grappling with the issue of marriagewhether they're married, or against marriage, or whether they're hoping at some point to be able to marry.

Interviewed by John Hayes.

Audrey Bilger and Cheryl Pawelski make a brief (blink and you'll miss it!) cameo appearance in this fun Butchies video—14 seconds in.