Dr Alex Gunn

I recently finished my Oxford–Cecil Lubbock-funded DPhil, titled ‘Living Arrangements: Queer Uses of Eclecticism in the British Aesthetic Movement, c.1867–1900’, which argues that stylistic eclecticism—broadly defined as selection and rearrangement from diverse historical and cultural sources—was used by writers and artists in the British Aesthetic Movement as a strategy for negotiating, and in many cases resisting, the dominant materialist and positivist ideologies which could be particularly oppressive for queer people, as such ideologies deterministically reduced queer people to aberrant bodies.  With chapters on Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Lionel Johnson, and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), and a large supporting cast of architects, painters, printmakers, stained-glass artists, furniture-designers, wallpaper-designers, and book-designers, as well as journalists, editors, critics, Socialist parsons, and Catholic priests, my thesis ranges across architecture, interior decoration, and theology, in the pursuit of the ‘House Beautiful’: an eclectic refuge built (both physically and textually) by queer aesthetes as an imaginative refuge from Victorian Britain.  I have published on Walter Pater’s ‘“A Strange Inverted Home-Sickness”: Pater’s Queer, Eclectic World-making’, a more detailed study of themes from a chapter of my thesis, in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (Summer 2024).

Building on this research, I am now beginning work on a study of the Arts and Crafts Movement from John Ruskin right up to its legacy—or continuation?—in contemporary responses to so-called ‘AI’, especially in the revival and preservation of heritage crafts.  Taking Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (2026), with all its metaphors of handicrafts, as a very important cue—as well as with reference to figures such as Rowan Williams, David Jones, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Mary Watts, and Ananda Coomaraswamy—I am especially keen to theorise the relationship between an Arts and Crafts ethos and religion, as two vital sources of resistance to industrial capitalism that have persisted alongside one another for the past two hundred years.

This year I have also acted as Research Assistant to Prof Stefano Evangelista, studying the reception of Japan in the periodicals of the latter half of the nineteenth century.