On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Professor Thomas Laqueur, Co-Director of the Program for the Medical Humanities, was honored for his decades of contributions to a wide range of academic communities in an event at the Social Science Matrix. Professor Laqueur is a historian of immense range and creativity who has set intellectual landmarks across a number of fields.  His work on the body and gender, on sex, and on death has mapped out a provocative, often counter-intuitive set of arguments that have opened up new subjects for historical study.  His books include The Work of the Dead (Princeton, 2015), Solitary Sex (Zone, 2003), Making Sex (Harvard, 1990), and Religion and Respectability (Yale, 1976).  The force of some scholars is neatly contained in their books, but Tom’s influence exceeds those bounds.  As a founding editor of Representations, at the helm of the Townshend Center for the Humanities, in his astute essays in the London Review of Books, and in mentoring generations of Berkeley graduate students from across the university, Tom’s role as an intellectual provocateur has also set him apart.