Birkbeck Eighteenth Century Research Group: 'Sexual Perversions in the Eighteenth Century'
Wednesday 9 June, 1-2.30pm in room B02, 43 Gordon Square
Julie Peakman from the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, will lead our next reading group session on ‘Sexual Perversions in the Eighteenth Century’.
The key set text is her introduction to Sexual Perversions 1650-1890 (Palgrave, 2009), which can be downloaded from www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=280774 <http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=280774.> .
Those wishing to attend might also want to look at Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25305 <http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25305> ) and/or the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom (available at http://supervert.com/elibrary/marquis_de_sade <https://exchange.bbk.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://supervert.com/elibrary/marquis_de_sade> ).
Dr. Julie Peakman, Post-Doctoral Honorary Fellow and Tutor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaelogy, has worked on the influence of religion and science on the development of erotic material in the eighteenth century. From there, she developed an interest in the treatment of ‘different’ sexualities in history. She has researched prostitution and eighteenth-century libertine culture, and has most recently been considering perceived ‘abnormal’ sexualities in eighteenth-century Britain and the emergence of female sexual pathologies.
Her publications include Emma Hamilton (London, Haus, 2005), Lascivious Bodies. A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (London, Atlantic, 2004), Mighty Lewd Books, The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke, Palgrave Press, 2003), and, as editor, Sexual Perversions 1650-1890 (Palgrave, 2009) and eight volumes of Whore Biographies, 1700-1825 (Pickering & Chatto, 2007). She has just finished editing A Cultural History of Sexuality for Berg, due out October 2010 (6 volumes from classical Greece to C21st); and her own new monograph, Civilising Sex, on sex & civilisation: 2000 years of history.
