GENDER.ED Directory

The primary aim of this course is to elucidate the colonial logic that underlies our imaginings of the future of work. Most often, the invocation of the ‘future of work’ refers to the contemporary practices and discourses that manifest and speculate upon how technology will impact the arrangement, distribution and function of work in the future. Taken as such, the future of work is most often analysed and imagined as either utopia or dystopia.

This course surveys the novel in Britain at a crucial stage in its development, namely the decades after the French Revolution in 1789. In this period the novel’s formal resources were developed in innovative ways in response to the intense ideological struggle prompted by this event, raising radical questions about women’s role in society, the future of slavery, repression and political violence; new conceptions of national history and culture underpinned reaction against this revolutionary spirit.

This course provides a detailed examination of performance theory and practice from 1945 to the present day. The course is structured as a series of two-hour seminars, one of which will take the form of a practical workshop led by a professional performer. The seminars will focus each week on different themes, including gender and sexuality, critical race theory, class identity, disability, and the posthuman. This course provides a detailed examination of performance theory and practice from 1945 to the present day.

Characteristically modern forms of sexual and gender identity came into being during the long eighteenth century. This course examines the representation of emergent queer identities in a range of genres, including drama, fiction, poetry and memoir. We'll read about mollies, fops and sodomites, tribades, sapphists, and female husbands. Early modern queerness was in some ways more capacious than contemporary ways of figuring non-normative sexual and gender identities, though it was also more violently policed.

This course introduces students to different concepts and discourses of terror in romantic period literature. It concentrates mainly on the relationship between the aesthetic category of the sublime and the political climate of fear created by the Reign of Terror in France in the mid-1790s and intensified by the revolutionary wars in Europe. The course explores how ideas and perceptions of terror fed into romantic literature, and how romantic literature in turn helped to reshape notions of fear.