University of Exeter

Post-Doc, Medical history

Other Affiliations: University of Edinburgh, English Literature
University of Oxford, English Language and Literature
Universität zu Köln, Englisches Seminar

Associate Research Fellow

College of Humanities

About

I am interested in literary and cultural studies, the history of sexuality, sexual science, and queer theory. My work focuses primarily on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. One constant that runs through much of my research to-date is an interest in the relation between sexuality and time.

I am currently working on my first monograph, entitled Temporal Mobility, Gender and Sexuality in Modernist Fiction, 1919-1934. This book explores the relation between temporal mobility – the experience of inhabiting different moments in and relations to time – and modernist sexualities. It argues that modernist fiction of the interwar period frequently depicts temporally mobile subjects to negotiate questions of gender and sexuality as well as related categories of difference such as class, nation and race. As a methodological framework, the focus on temporal mobility reveals the limitations of present-day sexual identity categories and binaries of homosexuality and heterosexuality, which are often challenged in modernist writing. Temporal mobility also makes it possible to think across disciplinary boundaries since literary figurations of time and its relation to gender and sexuality are shaped by evolutionary, psychoanalytic, sexological and eugenic discourses. Combining literary analysis with archival and contextual research, the book demonstrates that the relation between time, gender and sexuality crucially informs the work of a wide range of writers, including Bryher, H.D., Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, Radclyffe Hall, D.H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

As part of the Sexual History/Sexual Knowledge project, I am working on second monograph with Professor Kate Fisher, investigating different uses of the past in the construction of sexual knowledge in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. The project examines the use of historical data and evidence of sexual behaviours from non-Western cultures that were perceived as 'primitive' across different areas of knowledge, including sexology, psychoanalysis, literature, anthropology, ethnography and archaeology.

I am also putting together a critical edition of Radclyffe Hall's unpublished writings, entitled The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall (forthcoming with MUP, 2013). This project was made possible through a Hobby Foundation Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas in 2010.

I have been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to establish an international network of scholars to work on a project entitled 'Interdisciplinary Readings: Havelock Ellis & Co.' The aim of the network is to explore the interdisciplinary nature of Havelock Ellis' writings and explore previously neglected aspects of his work.

I am also very interested in sexuality studies and queer theory and have recently co-edited a volume of essays with Ben Davies, entitled Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). This book further explores the relationship between sexuality and time by drawing on various theoretical approaches and applying these to a variety of disciplinary contexts and historical moments.

Selected Conference Papers:

· (with Professor Kate Fisher) Sexology and Translation Symposium, Birkbeck University (14-15 June 2012): “Translating the Past: Havelock Ellis as Historian.” (invited)

· Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf, International Virginia Woolf Conference, University of Saskatchewan (forthcoming, 7-10 June 2012): Plenary Roundtable Discussion (invited)

· (with Dr Rebecca Langlands) Romosexuality Conference, University of Durham (16-18 April 2012): “Material Passion and Noble Spirit: Sexological Uses of Rome."

· British Society for Literature and Science Conference, University of Oxford (12-14 April 2012): “‘The Purifying Breath of Spring’: Havelock Ellis, Science and Literariness.”

· BSHS Conference, University of Exeter (14-17 July 2011): “’We Cannot Be Greek Now’: Age, Class and the Making of Sexual Inversion.”

· Medicalization of Sex Conference, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (28-30 April 2011): “Sexual History Before The History of Sexuality? Constructions of the Past in Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex.”

· NeMLA Conference, Rutgers University, Panel on Interdisciplinary Studies and Women Modernists (7-10 April 2011): “Navigating Sexology: Bryher, Havelock Ellis, and the Adventure of Sex.”

· 1910 Centenary Conference, University of Glasgow (10-12 December 2010): “’the most beautiful thing I have ever written’: Freud’s Case Study of Leonardo da Vinci and Modernist Culture.”

· Scottish Network of Modernist Studies Seminar, University of Stirling (30 January 2010): “The Sexual, National and Temporal Crisis of World War I Literature.”

· Science Studies Research Seminar, University of Edinburgh (26 June 2009): “The Sexological Case Study in Relation to Time.”

· Sexualities In and Out of Time Conference, University of Edinburgh (28-29 November 2008): “N.O. Body’s Future: Sexual Intermediacy and Anticipation in the Case of Karl M. Baer.”

· Bodies and Things: Victorian Literature and the Matter of Culture, University of Oxford (27 September 2008): “Haunting Matters: The Hermaphroditic Body and the Politics of Presence in Late Victorian Literature.”

· NeMLA Conference, Buffalo, NY / Panel on ‘Queer Theory and Becoming’ (10-13 April 2008): “The Temporal Politics of Intersex.”

· The Transforming Body in Popular Culture Seminar, University of Southampton (28 November 2007): “Intersex by Design? Constructing the Intersexual Body in Contemporary Popular Culture.”

· Cross-Currents Conference, University of Sussex (5 July 2007): “Theorising Intersex.”

· IAPL Conference, Nicosia, Cyprus (4-9 June 2007): “Tiresias and the Diorama Baby: Strategic Layering and the Construction of Intersexual Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.”

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