Cultural Studies and Humanities Good News August

Published Books

Our former colleague, Professor Alison Oram, has just published her jointly book, Queer Beyond London with MUP. Based on an AHRC funded project, the book argues that when it comes to queer British history, London has stolen the limelight. But what about the millions of queer lives lived elsewhere? In Queer beyond London, two leading LGBTQ+ historians take you on a journey through four English cites from the sixties to the noughties, exploring the northern post-industrial heartlands and taking in the salty air of the seaside cities of the South.

Covering the bohemian, artsy world of Brighton, the semi-hidden queer life of military Plymouth, the lesbian activism of Leeds, and the cutting edge dance and drag scenes of Manchester, they show how local people, places and politics shaped LGBTQ+ life in each city, forging vibrant and distinctive queer cultures of their own. Using pioneering community histories from each place, and including the voices of queer people who have made their lives there, the book tells local stories at the heart of our national history.

Advance publicity for the book comes from a range of sources, telling us a lot about the reach of this research: 

"A rich celebration of the everyday LGBTQ stories that have been shaped by - and have helped to shape - modern English urban life. Insightful, inspiring, and completely fascinating." - Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and The Paying Guests

"Being queer is all about change: longing for it, fighting for it - and surviving it. This brilliantly detailed tour of the last fifty years of LGBTQ+ culture and lives in four great English cities digs down through the layers of history and geography and gets to the real nuts and bolts of our experiences. A real labour of love - and quite an achievement." - Neil Bartlett, author of Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall and Address Book

In October 2022, Rob Burroughs's new book will be published. Black Students in Imperial Britain: The African Institute, Colwyn Bay, 1889-1911 is with Liverpool University Press. This is the main output from Rob's Leverhulme Trust funded Research Fellowship (2019-20). Thanks to Leverhulme and CSH, this book will be available OA (and at a fairly affordable paperback price - another perk of OA). More details, including flattering comments on it are here.

Published papers

Athira Unni, a PGR researcher at CSH, attended the Women in World(-)Literature conference at the University of Warwick and presented a paper related to her Ph.D. research. The paper was titled "Dystopian Hyperbole and Reproductive Labour in Margaret Atwood and Mahasweta Devi" and was received well.

The paper argues for a new textual mode named dystopian hyperbole that can facilitate a juxtaposition between a social realist text from a semi-peripheral country with a dystopian text from a core country. The Eurocentric definitions in Utopian Studies deny an opportunity for such a comparative approach otherwise necessitating such an intervention. The paper is now under peer-review for the journal Utopian Studies. 

While not directly taken from her Ph.D. thesis, the paper draws on some material from one of her chapters to present a 1905 short story of the Indian writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain from colonial India in contrast with the eugenic and proto-colonial utopianism of the more popular Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herland (1915).  The paper also focuses on Hossain's indigenous utopianism as a mixture of syncretic feminism and Islamic utopianism that values education, peace, and wisdom over the focus on motherhood and reproduction in Gilman's novel. 

Athira also attended the Utopian Studies Society Europe conference in Brighton, where she presented her paper "Decolonising Utopia: Hope as A Rallying Point for Non-Western Models in Utopian Studies," proposing that utopia/dystopia are culturally specific and not generalized, non-spatial concepts divorced from history. Drawing on the work of Adam Stock, Philip E. Wegner, and Bill Ashcroft, the paper makes a point for hybrid models of utopian thinking found in non-Western contexts and for hope as a point of departure for discussion. The paper was received well, with some arguments that might appear soon in a forthcoming journal article.

A journal article by Athira Unni about sexual violence and cognitive estrangement was published in SFRA Review on August 2nd 2022. The article explores these themes in two contemporary dystopian novels, Gather the Daughters (2017) by Jennie Melamed and The Hierarchies (2021) by Ros Anderson. The link to the article.

Prof Rob Burroughs has published a new article. 'The redeemed life of Lena Clark, Christian missionary in the Congo Free State' is published in Cultural and Social History, as an advance release of a forthcoming Special Issue on 'Humanitarianism and Biography' edited by Rebecca Gill and our own Helen Dampier. Because of LBU's subscription arrangements with Taylor and Francis, the article qualified for OA publication (so feel free to find it via our 'Discover' engine and drive up the number of views!).

Elections

Prof Rob Burroughs has been elected to the Executive Committee of University English, the main professional organisation for English lecturers in universities and colleges across the UK.