Dr Sally Newman (visiting 2010-11)
We are pleased to announce that
Dr Sally Newman has joined Queer@King’s as a Visiting Research Fellow from July 2010 to March 2011, funded by the British Academy visiting scholars scheme. Sally is a research fellow in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Melbourne. She will be coming to King’s to work on the first critical edition of the literary correspondence between poet A. Mary F. Robinson Duclaux (1857–1944) – whose salon in Paris was the meeting place for writers and artists travelling between Britain and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and intellectuals Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856–1935), and John A. Symonds (1840–1893), co-author of Sexual Inversion (1897), with Havelock Ellis. The letters between Symonds – a classical scholar who struggled with his own homosexual desire – and romantic partners Vernon Lee and Mary Robinson Duclaux provide unique insight into the emergence of competing discourses of sexuality and the politics of friendship between male and female aesthetes in the late Victorian period.
Sally’s research is in the history of sexualities and emotions with a focus on the ways in which the archive (as a material and conceptual entity), is deployed to provide ‘evidence’ of desire, sex, love, relationships and/or identity; and how this shapes particular historical narratives in different national contexts. She is interested in what Dominick LaCapra has termed the ‘transferential relation’ that exists between the historian and those objects of the past that she choses to love or become possessed by, and the ways in which these often-unconscious investments in particular ways of seeing profoundly shape one's research and writing.
Her new book,
The Intimate Archive (co-authored with Maryanne Dever and Ann Vickery), was published in 2009 and her articles have appeared in
Journal of the History of Sexuality,
Women’s History Review and
Australian Feminist Studies.
If you are interested in joining Queer@King’s as a visiting scholar (non-stipendiary), please contact the Director, Robert Mills.