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A Violent World of Difference: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Shaping of Queer Modernity

Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies, has been awarded an AHRC Fellowship for her project: A Violent World of Difference: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Shaping of Queer Modernity.

Heike Bauer, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Gender Studies, has been awarded an AHRC Fellowship for her project: A Violent World of Difference: Magnus Hirschfeld and the Shaping of Queer Modernity.

The project turns to the work of the Jewish sexologist and homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) to address a gap in current scholarship on the history of sexuality: that while we know of many queer lives which have ended tragically as a result of legal persecution, violent attack or the inability to cope with heteronormative social and emotional pressures, we know surprisingly little about the traumatic impact of this suffering on the women and men who identified in some form with the victims. Hirschfeld’s writings, which range from discussions of how the death of Oscar Wilde affected his homosexual contemporaries to studies of lesbian and homosexual suicide, provide compelling new insights into the way violence shaped queer modernity. You can read more about this project in a recent blog post by Dr Bauer here.

Dr Bauer has previously led an interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust funded project on the global networks of exchange that shaped debates about sexuality across the modern world: Sexology and Translation: Scientific and Cultural Encounters in the Modern World, 1860-1930.

She teaches on the BA Arts and Humanities and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature. You can follow her on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/Heike_Bauer

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