Queer Modernisms

This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom. 

Abstract: 

Eveline Kilian (HU Berlin)

Queering Daphne du Maurier

Although Daphne du Maurier was never part of any modernist literary coterie and is not considered a ‘metropolitan’ writer on account of her close identification with Cornwall, her books centre on clearly modernist concerns, both thematically and aesthetically. Practically all of her work engages with divided selves, inner worlds, social restrictions, gender norms and questions of sexual desire, hotly debated issues in the 1920s and 1930s, which Du Maurier kept exploring throughout her whole writing career and well into the post-WW II period.

Consequently, like some other modernist texts, her oeuvre proves very open to queer readings and shows a remarkable affinity to concepts discussed in queer studies in the 1990s. In fact, as I will demonstrate, queer theory enables us to understand more precisely the extent of her radical thinking. Texts like “The Doll”, “Monte Verità” or The House on the Strand explore notions of queer time and space, undermine heteronormative structures and probe alternative forms of sexuality. For du Maurier, the writer, the literary imagination was her prime alternative space to invent parallel worlds and relationalities in different variations and to sketch queer horizons.

Bio

Eveline Kilian was Professor of English at Humboldt University of Berlin until her retirement in 2024, and she is now a Senior Researcher at HU Berlin.

Her major research areas are modernism and interwar literature, life writing, queer subjectivities, trans/gender and queer studies and metropolitan cultures. She has been a driving force in the Joint PhD Programme between Humboldt University of Berlin and King’s College London since 2011. She co-founded an international research group on Queer Theory and Literary Studies that has run regular workshops since 2017. In 2021, she was appointed Academic Chair in the Democracy Hub of the European University Alliance Circle U., a position she held until 2023. She is the German PI of the Polish-German researchproject Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production of Queer Theory in Polish and German Contexts, funded by the German and Polish Research Foundations (DFG and NCN; 2023-2026).

Her book publications include Life Writing and Space (ed. with Hope Wolf, Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism and the Political (ed. with Elahe Hashemi Yekani and Beatrice Michaelis, Ashgate 2013), London: Eine literarische Entdeckungsreise (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), GeschlechtSverkehrt: Theoretische und literarische Perspektiven des gender-bending (Helmer, 2004) and Momente innerweltlicher Transzendenz: Die Augenblickserfahrung in Dorothy Richardsons Romanzyklus Pilgrimage und ihr ideengeschichtlicher Kontext (Niemeyer, 1997).

Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston 

Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston is a non-binary academic, journalist, and gender consultant from the North of Ireland, specializing in the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, the history of censorship, neurodivergence, gender-diversity, and trans inclusion. Lloyd Meadhbh presently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in English at the University of Cambridge, where they also hold the position of Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College. They are working on a project exploring the medicalization and politicization of sex in early twentieth-century British, US, Canadian, and Caribbean culture. Their first monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (OUP, 2023), explores the ways in the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Lloyd Meadhbh is Vice-Chair of the British Association for Irish Studies, a member of the British Society for Literature and Science executive council, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.