Research interests

I am currently working on two projects related to my interest in the relationship between sexual sciences and European (especially German-language and British) literature, visual culture and performance in the late 19th and early 20th century:

‘The Politics of Sexual Nature: Sexology, Animals and the Arts (1862-1935)’

In this project, I investigate the role of animals as well as concepts of nature and naturalness in the development of modern concepts of sex, gender and sexuality in Britain and the German-speaking world. I will investigate medico-scientific texts, as well as cultural, literary and visual sources, in order to explore how non-human animal bodies, behaviours and metaphors are used to develop and challenge changing ideas about the nature of sex, gender and sexuality in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe. I aim to show that attempts to naturalise sexuality through animal research do not necessarily incorporate sexuality into a normalising and normative system of reproduction, purity and health, but into more complex ecological systems of desire, fluidity and dissolving boundaries (e.g. nature/culture, human/animal).

My work so far has focused on how moths and butterflies (in particular of the intersex type) have been used in the sexological discourse of the 1920s to argue for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and how sexology has been inspired by performances of the Butterfly Dance, which (I argue) proposes a vision of sexual nature that is not pastoral and cannot be co-opted straight-forwardly into a political project. Future work will focus on the importance of ants, toads and slugs (and more) in the production of sexual knowledge. So far, the project has resulted in an article for History of Human Sciences and a co-edited special issue on "Sex and Nature" for Environmental Humanties. Related to this project I have also received an AHRC public engagement grant in support of the project "Queering climate activism: Engaging young LGBTQ+ people with climate research". 

Series: Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany

This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from Sigmund Freud’s theories of homosexuality in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “third sex”   in Berlin. Together, they provided a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.
 

Awards and Grants

2021: Arts and Humanities Research Council/UKRI Research and Development grant (PI) for “Queering climate activism: Engaging young LGBTQ+ people with climate research”, with Jana Funke as Co-I

2021: Wellcome Trust secondment award (PI) for secondment fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum

2018: University of Exeter Global Partnership fund for Outward Academic Mobility Fellowship to Humboldt University Berlin

2016: Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) Postdoctoral Scholarship, University of Cambridge

2016: Sylvia Naish Postdoctoral Fellowship, Institute of Modern Languages Research

2015: AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellowship, University of Cambridge

2012-2015: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Postgraduate Award for PhD in German

2011-2012: Tsuzuki Fellowship, Nihon Keizai Daigaku (Fukuoka, Japan), awarded by Fitzwillian College, Cambridge

Research Excellence Prizes

• 2021: Women in German article prize for excellent research and scholarship in the field of feminist German studies for the article “The Potency of the Butterfly: The Reception of Richard B. Goldschmidt’s Animal Experiments in German Sexology around 1920” published in History of Human Sciences
• 2016: Book Proposal Prize by Peter Lang Oxford to the most promising book proposal resulting from a PhD in German Studies
• 2015: Postgraduate Essay Prize awarded by Women in German Studies in collaboration with German Life and Letters. 

Selected talks:

Invited Keynotes and Plenary Papers

• 2018    Plenary Panel “Pitching the Discipline: Where is German in 2018?” Association for German Studies annual conference, Bangor University.
• 2017    Keynote Lecture “‘Love for Every Taste’: Sexual Sciences and the Department Store in Early-twentieth-century German Life Writing”, Postgraduate Medical Humanities conference, University of Exeter.

Invited Paper

• 2019    “Narrating Human-animal Sexual Nature around 1920: Richard Goldschmidt, Magnus Hirschfeld and Hanns Heinz Ewers”, Narrative Science in Techno-environments: Integrating History of Science with Environmental History and Humanities, LSE.
• 2018    “The Potency of the Butterfly: Gender, Sexuality and Non-human Animals in German Sexology and the Arts after 1900”, Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies, Warwick University.
• 2016    “Life Writings and Sexual Sciences: Writing the Queer Self in early 20th-century Germany”, History of Sexuality seminar series, Institute of Historical Research.

Selected Conference Papers

• 2021    “Ants in Your Pants: Sexuality, Morality and Ants in Sexual Knowledge Production in Ewers, Hirschfeld, Goldschmidt”, American Comparative Literature Association.
• 2019    “Beastly Butterflies: Sexual Nature in Sexology and Modern Dance”, Beastly Modernism, Glasgow.
• 2019    “The Blood-red Queen and the Professor: The Sexual Nature of Humans and Ants in Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Ameisen [Ants] (1925)”, British Society of Literature and Science conference, Royal Holloway, University of London.
• 2018    “Rethinking the Human: Sexology, Zoology, Literature and Visual Art after Darwin (c.1890-1930)”, Animal and Society Summer Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
• 2018    “Queering Butterflies: On the Relationship between Sexology and Animal Genetics, ca. 1920”, British Animal Studies Network conference, Strathclyde University.
• 2017    “Sexology and Film in and beyond Anders als die Andern (1919)”, The Visual Archives of Sexology, Birkbeck.
• 2017    “Making LBGT* History: Gender and Sexuality in Anders als die Andern (1919)”, Association for German Studies annual conference, University of Warwick.
• 2017    “‘An endless procession of them, from all times’: Sexology, Film, and Historical Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Anders als die Andern (1919) and The Danish Girl (2015)”, Gender in Historical Film and TV conference, University of Minnesota.
• 2015    “Body, Name, Gender: ‘Trans-Investiture’ in Early-twentieth-century”, Grenzen der Trans_Konzepte, University of Tübingen.
• 2013    “Representations of Embodiment in Early-twentieth-century Life Writings of Gender and Sexual ‘Deviants’”, This Is My Body conference, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge.
• 2013    “Hospitable Reading: An Approach to Life Writings of Gender and Sexual ‘Deviants’”, Crimes of Passion conference, University of Münster.

External impact and engagement

I have a wealth of experience in engaging different publics with my research. I have led externally-funded public engagement projects and have collaborated with colleagues across disciplines to develop and conduct engaged research and public engagement activities.

From September to December 2021 I was PI on an AHRC public engagement grant in support of the project "Queering climate activism: Engaging young LGBTQ+ people with climate research". The project uses history and comedy to empower LGBTQ+ young people to play a central role in climate activism.

In 2020-21 I hosted a Creative Fellowship on the topic 'The Politics of Sexual Nature' in collaboration with Exeter's Arts and Culture team. Together with Creative Fellow and comedian Siân Docksey I run the Sex and Nature Salon, which brings together comedians, academics, and the public to investigate how 'sex' and 'nature' come together in popular culture. The Sex & Nature Salon now has a website, too.

Since 2018 I have organised a series of public engagement knowledge exchange workshops with the Rethinking Sexology project, the Sex and History project and the Forschungsstelle Kulturgeschichte der Sexualität at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, as well as NGOs, museums and sex educators. This series of events facilitates knowledge exchange about research-led museum and youth work in the area of gender and sexual health and diversity.

I am also the founder of the AHRC-funded project 'Sex in Six Objects'. The project uses objects from the history of sexuality to talk to young people about gender and sexual health and diversity. Workshops were organised in collaboration with various researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Exeter, Anglia Ruskin and the University of Manchester. Our workshops took place at various locations in Cambridge, including the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, as well as at the Freud Museum in London. The project has been covered in the local and national news.

I was also co-curator and specialist advisor for the art exhibition ‘Naomi Wilzig and Magnus Hirschfeld: Two Collections from the History of Sexuality’, which took place a the Institute of Sexology Research Center at the Humboldt Universität Berlin in May 2015.

I welcome the opportunity to share my research with the general public. I have given a public talk on ‘Literature and Sexuality’ at the Turl Street Arts Festival at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2016) and have co-organised a workshop on historical gender and sexual diversity for the LGBT+ History Month event in Bristol (2018) and a tour of the Institute of Sexology for Transgender Day of Remembrance at the University of Exeter (2019).

I occassionaly write academic journalism for The King's Review. You can find my interview with Jacqueline Rose and my article on sex education online.

I have written blog posts for Women in German Studies and Living Languages.

Contribution to discipline

I am the co-founder and co-organiser of the Interdisciplinary Animal Studies Reading Group. I currently run this group with Dr Ginny Thomas (Centre for Rural Policy).

I am Treasurer for Women in German Studies (WIGS), a member of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS), the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS), Women in German (WIG), and the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).

I serve on the jury for the DAAD annual German Language Competition.

My book reviews have been published in Seminar, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Weimarer Beiträge, Modern Languages Review, and Cultural and Social History. I have reviewed articles for Social History of Medicine, the Journal of Gender Studies, Porn Studies, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Jahrbuch Sexualitäten.

Teaching

The majority of my teaching is research-led in nature. You can see modules that I have contributed to or convened below.

I have supervised MA dissertations for students on the MA Global Literatures and Cultures, MA Translation Studies, and MA English. I am interested in supervising dissertations on topics that cover my teaching and research interests (see Research section)

I am accepting PhD students researching any of the areas covered by my research expertise.

Modules taught

• EAS3003 - Dissertation
• EASM023 - Dissertation
• HIH3619 - Sexualities
• LIB1105 - Being Human in the Modern World
• MLG1001 - German Language
• MLG1021 - Outside In: An Introduction to Outcasts and Outsiders in German-language Literature and Film
• MLG2001 - German Language, Written and Oral
• MLG2019 - Gender, Race and Migration in 20th and 21st-century German Literature
• MLG3040 - Sex, Sciences and the Arts
• SML1208 - Language, Culture, International Relations
• SMLM145 - Translation Dissertation

Biography

I joined the University of Exeter in 2017 after completing my PhD in German at the University of Cambridge (King's College, 2016). I have an MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies, also from the University of Cambridge (Fitzwilliam College, 2012) and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London (2010). Before my PhD, I also spent one year as Tsuzuki Scholar at 日本経済大学 (Japan University of Economics) in Fukuoka, Japan, to study Japanese language and culture.

After submitting my PhD I was the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge (2016) and worked as Research Assistant for Professor Emerita Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College, Cambridge (2017). From October to November 2016 I was Sylvia Naish Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. From 2016-2017 I was MHRA Scholar at the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. From 2017-2020 I was Associate Research Fellow. funded by the Wellcome Trust, at the University of Exeter.