Professor Heike Bauer
-
Overview
Overview
Biography
Heike Bauer is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History, and Head of Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Birkbeck.
During her time as Associate Dean and Head of the Department of English, Theatre & Creative Writing, English Language & Literature at Birkbeck was ranked 2nd in the UK by the THE in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.
Heike has published widely on literature and the modern histories of gender sexuality, visual culture and the rise of queer and feminist graphic novels, and on human-animal relations. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the English Association, member of the AHRC Peer Review College, management group member of the Birkbeck Institute for Antisemitism, advisory group member of Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies (BiGS), co-convenor of the History of Sexuality Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, and member of the editorial boards of Australian Feminist Studies, History of the Human Sciences, and Gender & History.
Her research received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the British Academy (UK), the Wellcome Trust (UK), the Leslie Centre for the Humanities at Dartmouth College (USA), the Cornelia Goethe Centrum at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany), the Christina Institute at Helsinki University (Finland), William & Mary University (USA) and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University (USA).
Heike teaches and supervises doctoral students on topics relating to gender and sexuality in fiction, history, culture and criticism since the nineteenth-century including projects that cut across conventional period and disciplinary boundaries.
Highlights
On 16 June 2025, Heike is hosting the Annual Celebration of Research in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at Birkbeck.
Heike & Karen Hiestand (Royal Veterinary College) secured a fully-funded Bloomsbury Scholarship on the rise of specialist veterinary care in the UK to start in 2025-26.
Heike previously examined human-canine relations in a multidisciplinary Wellcome ISSF-funded symposium she organised, 'Dangerous Companions? New Perspectives on Human-Canine Coexistence' (2022), and as participant in a workshop on canine health & welfare funding organised by Alison Skipper at the Royal Veterinary College in 2023. You can read the related paper by Skipper et al. (2024) here and Heike's article on the intersections between modern lesbian and pedigree dog history here.
Other major recent publications include Jewish Women in Comics: Borders and Bodies, co-edited by Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum and Sarah Lightman (Syracuse University Press, 2023), and 'The Visual Archives of Sex', a special issue of Radical History Review 142 (2022) co-edited with Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton and Jennifer Tucker. Read the introduction here.
Qualifications
- PhD, Birkbeck, University of London, 2004
- MA , University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1999
Web profiles
ORCID
0000-0003-4067-9989 -
Research
Research
Research interests
- Modern history of sexuality / queer history/ LGBTQI+ pasts
- Fiction & graphic narratives (nineteenth-century to contemporary)
- Human-animal relations/ animal history
- Visual culture
Research overview
I have research interests in literature and the modern histories of gender and sexuality, human-animal relations and animal history, visual culture, & LGBTQI+ history, fiction and graphic memoirs.
To date I have published six books, three special journal issues and over twenty articles and chapters in edited collections, most recently Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders, co-edited with Andrea Greenbaum and Sarah Lightman (Syracuse University Press, 2023), and 'Visual Archives of Sex', co-edited with Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton & Jennifer Tucker, which was published by Radical History Review 142 (2022).
I'm now working on two major projects:
1) a multi-dimensional study of human-dog relations since the nineteenth-century. Related activities include the Wellcome ISSF-funded symposium, Dangerous Companions? New Perspectives on Human-Canine Coexistence (2022), which featured historians, social scientists, literary and cultural scholars, and veterinary professionals; and a Bloomsbury Scholarship collaboration with Karen Hiestand (RVC) on the rise of specialist veterinary care in twenty-first century Britain.
2) a major study of the intersections between modern queer and animal histories tentatively titled Pets Portraits: Queer History. It turns attention to the cats and dogs who shared their lives with some of the iconic figures of queer modernity. Related publications include 'In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their Dogs' (Gender & History 35.3; first published in July 2022), and a short piece, 'Queer Dogs' published in the Queer Objects (2019) collection edited by Chris Brickell and Judith Collard.
Queer history was also the focus of my most recent monograph, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Temple University Press, 2017). Funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (you can read the AHRC feature on it here), it examines little known and forgotten writings by Magnus Hirschfeld, the influential sexologist who is best known today for his homosexual activism, transgender work and founding of the world's first Institute of Sexual Science in 1919. It shows that violence had a significant impact on queer lives around 1900, but also reveals the gendered and racialized limits of the emerging homosexual rights movement in the West. Winner of a Knowledge Unlatched award, the book has been reviewed widely.
Research Centres and Institutes
- History of Sexuality Seminar, Institute for Historical Research
- https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/environment-and-sustainability, Birkbeck Research Centre for Environment and Sustainability
- Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Centre for Medical and Health Humanities
- Centre for Contemporary Literature
-
Supervision and teaching
Supervision and teaching
Supervision
The first of my PhD students graduated in 2012. Since then I have supervised successfully to timely completion a wide range of projects including those rooted in English Studies, broadly conceived, and those that cut across conventional disciplinary boundaries and/or work across different languages. For example, I have co-supervised projects with History, Modern Languages, Law, and Psychosocial Studies.
My students have been funded by the AHRC/CHASE, Birkbeck School of Arts, and Canadian and Japanese Government grants. Several of them have established successful academic careers while others are working in the arts, teaching and the social sector.
I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students with interests in gender and sexuality, especially on topics relating to:
- Modern and contemporary LGBTQI+ history and fiction
- The history of sexuality / sexology/ LGBTQI+ pasts
- Animal studies / animal history
- Visual cultures / graphic memoirs
- Archives
- Translation & the cross-cultural travel of ideas
Please contact me (h.bauer@bbk.ac.uk) if you would like an informal discussion about your ideas for an MPhil/PhD.
Details on the application format and process can be found here.
Current doctoral researchers
-
AVERY CURRAN
-
BRELL WILSON-MORRIS
-
JO BRYDON-DICKENSON
-
ELEANOR FRANZEN
Doctoral alumni since 2013-14
-
ELENA GKIVISI
-
MONALESIA EARLE
-
CHRISTINE RAMSEY
-
DICKON EDWARDS
-
GEORGE TOWNSEND
-
ROSIE EASTON
-
GOLNOOSH NOURPANAH
-
YUTAKA OKUHATA
-
EVELYN HEINZ
-
DAVID MILLER
Teaching
I teach core and option modules at all levels from first-year BA classes to MA seminars and PhD training sessions.
Recent teaching contributions include at undergraduate level Writing London (level 4); The Production of the Human: Decolonizing the Canon (level 4), Reading Literature (level 4), Sexuality and Modernity: Reading Across Cultures (level 6), and Literature and Cultural Identity: Intersectionalities of Race, Class and Gender (level 6).
At graduate level they include New Directions in Cultural and Critical Studies (core module, MA Cultural and Critical Studies), Becoming Modern (core module, MA Modern & Contemporary Literature), and the MA options, Twenty-First Century Feminist Fiction and the World in Crisis, and Disciplining Sex: Sexuality, Society, and Modern Literary Culture.
-
Publications
Publications
Article
- Bauer, Heike (2022) In the canine archives of sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their dogs. Gender and History ISSN 0953-5233.
- Sepahvand, A. and Slater, M. and Timm, A.F. and Vaccaro, J. and Bauer, Heike and Sutton, Katie (2022) Curating visual archives of sex: a roundtable discussion. Radical History Review 142, pp. 19-36. ISSN 0163-6545.
- Bauer, Heike and Greenbaum, A. and Lightman, S. (2016) Introduction: autobiographical comics by Jewish women. Studies in Comics 6 (2), pp. 201-208. ISSN 2040-3232.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Tangles: an interview with Sarah Leavitt. Studies in Comics 6 (2), pp. 329-337. ISSN 2040-3232.
- Bauer, Heike (2014) Vital lines drawn from books: difficult feelings in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. Journal of Lesbian Studies 18 (3), pp. 266-281. ISSN 1089-4160.
- Bauer, Heike and Mahn, C. (2014) Introduction: transnational lesbian cultures. Journal of Lesbian Studies 18 (3), pp. 203-208. ISSN 1089-4160.
- Bauer, Heike (2010) ‘Race’, normativity and the history of sexuality: Magnus Hirschfeld’s racism and the early-twentieth-century sexology. Psychology and Sexuality 1 (3), pp. 239-249. ISSN 1941-9899.
- Bauer, Heike (2009) Theorizing female inversion: sexology, discipline and gender at the fin de siècle. Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (1), pp. 84-102. ISSN 1043-4070.
- Bauer, Heike (2003) "The Idea of Development": decadence, aestheticism and late-Victorian notions about sexual identity in Marius the Epicurean. Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 9, pp. 1-15. ISSN 1327-8746.
- Bauer, Heike (2003) "Not a translation but a mutilation": the limits of translation and the discipline of Sexology. The Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2), pp. 381-405. ISSN 0893-5378.
- Bauer, Heike (2003) Richard von Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" as sexual sourcebook for Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness". Critical Survey 15 (3), pp. 23-38. ISSN 0011-1570.
Book
- Bauer, Heike and Greebaum, A. and Lightman, S., eds. (2023) Jewish women in comics: bodies and borders. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815637813.
- Bauer, Heike (2017) The Hirschfeld Archives: violence, death, and modern queer culture. Sexuality Studies. Philadelphia, U.S.: Temple University Press. ISBN 9781439914328.
- Bauer, Heike, ed. (2015) Sexology and translation: cultural and scientific encounters across the modern world. Sexuality Studies. Philadelphia, U.S.: Temple University Press. ISBN 9781439912492.
- Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt, eds. (2012) Queer 1950s: rethinking sexuality in the postwar years. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230300699.
- Bauer, Heike (2009) English literary sexology: translations of inversion, 1860-1930. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230221635.
- Bauer, Heike, ed. (2006) Women and cross-dressing: 1800-1939. History of Feminism. Oxford, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415323024.
Book Review
- Bauer, Heike (2024) Review of Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Love by Laurie Marhoefer..
- Bauer, Heike (2023) The use and abuse of queer history.
- Bauer, Heike (2020) Female Husbands: A Trans History by Jen Manion (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
- Bauer, Heike (2019) Veronika Fuechtner; Douglas E. Haynes; Ryan M. Jones (Editors). A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880–1960. xiii + 437 pp., notes, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. $34.95 (paper). ISBN 9780520293397.
- Bauer, Heike (2019) Ralph M. Leck, Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science.
- Bauer, Heike (2019) Review of Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld (Michigan UP, 2017) ed. by Michael Thomas, Taylor, Annette Timm, and Rainer Herrn..
- Bauer, Heike and Crozier, I. (2017) Sexology, historiography, citation, embodiment: a review and (frank) exchange.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America, by April R. Haynes.
- Bauer, Heike (2014) Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories by Geertje Mak (Manchester University Press, 2012).
- Bauer, Heike (2014) Radclyffe Hall: a life in the writing by Richard Dellamora (University of Philadelphia Press, 2011).
Book Section
- Bauer, Heike (2021) The Institute of Sexual Science and Sexual Subcultures in 1920s Berlin. In: Stedman, G. and Evangelista, S. (eds.) Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond. Wallstein Verlag. ISBN 9783835339873.
- Bauer, Heike (2017) Constructions of desire. In: Craig, R. and Linge, I. (eds.) Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900. Cultural History and Literary Imagination. Berlin, Germany: Peter Lang. ISBN 9781787077614.
- Bauer, Heike (2017) Dracula and Sexology. In: Luckhurst, Roger (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 76-84. ISBN 9781316597217.
- Bauer, Heike (2016) Staging untranslatability: Magnus Hischfeld encounters Philadelphia. In: Wiggin, B. and Macleod, C. (eds.) Un/Translatables: Across Germanic Languages and Cultures. Evanston, U.S.: Northwestern University Press. pp. 193-202. ISBN 9780810133440.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Comics, graphic narratives, and lesbian lives. In: Medd, J. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature. The Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 219-235. ISBN 9781107054004.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Introduction: translation and the global histories of sexuality. In: Bauer, Heike (ed.) Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Sexuality Studies. Philadelphia, U.S.: Temple University Press. pp. 1-14. ISBN 9781439912492.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Suicidal subjects: translation and the emotional foundations of Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexology. In: Bauer, Heike (ed.) Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Sexuality Studies. Philadelphia, U.S.: Temple University Press. pp. 233-252. ISBN 9781439912492.
- Bauer, Heike (2015) Literary sexualities. In: Hillman, D. and Maude, U. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 101-115. ISBN 9781107644397.
- Bauer, Heike (2014) Burning sexual subjects: books, homophobia and the Nazi destruction of the Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin. In: Partington, G. and Smyth, A. (eds.) Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 17-33. ISBN 9781137367655.
- Bauer, Heike (2013) Graphic Lesbian Continuum: Ilana Zeffren. In: Lightman, S. (ed.) Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews. Jefferson, U.S.: McFarland. pp. 98-109. ISBN 9780786465538.
- Bauer, Heike (2012) Sexology backward: Hirschfeld, Kinsey and the reshaping of sex research in the 1950s. In: Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, Uk: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 133-149. ISBN 9780230300699.
- Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (2012) Introduction: Queer 1950s: rethinking sexuality in the postwar years. In: Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years. Gender and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1-10. ISBN 9780230300699.
- Bauer, Heike (2012) Sexuality in Enlightenment popular culture. In: Peakman, J. (ed.) A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Enlightenment. The Cultural Histories Series. London, UK: Berg. pp. 159-183. ISBN 9781847888037.
- Bauer, Heike (2011) Lesbian time. In: Giffney, N. and Sauer, M.S. and Watt, D. (eds.) The Lesbian Premodern. The New Middle Ages. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 161-169. ISBN 9780230616769.
- Bauer, Heike (2008) Measurements of civilisation: non-western female sexuality and the fin de siècle social body. In: Cryle, P. and Forth, C.E. (eds.) Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle: The Making of a "Central Problem". Deleware, U.S.: Delaware University Press. pp. 93-108. ISBN 9781611491010.
- Bauer, Heike (2006) Is there a history of female cross-dressing?. In: Bauer, Heike (ed.) Women and Cross-Dressing: 1800-1939. History of Feminism. London, UK: Routledge. pp. xiii-xxxvii. ISBN 9780415323024.
- Bauer, Heike (2006) Scholars, scientists and sexual inverts: authority and sexology in Nineteenth-Century scientific thinking. In: Clifford, D. and Wadge, E. and Warwick, A. and Willis, M. (eds.) Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Thinking. London, UK: Anthem Press. pp. 197-206. ISBN 9781843312123.
Editorial
- Bauer, Heike and Pappademos, M. and Sutton, K. and Tucker, J. (2022) Visual histories of sex: collecting, curating, archiving. Radical History Review (142), pp. 1-18. Duke University Press. ISSN 0163-6545.
-
Business and community
Business and community
Media
I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:
- LGBTQI+ history
- LGBTQI+ fiction
- History of sexuality - sexology
- Animal history/ human-animal relations - especially in relation to dogs & cats
- Comics and graphic memoirs
Outreach
I regularly share my research with a wide range of audiences.
Recent activities include, for example, published pieces in the THE and the popular blog Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality; facilitating a workshop on anti-queer violence for humanities scholars and medical professionals; hosting a public roundtable discussion with LGBTQI+ curators on queer museums; and presenting public lectures at the London Metropolitan Archives and the Schwules Museum* Berlin.