Alex Gunn
Thesis title: Living Arrangements: Queer Uses of Eclecticism in the Aesthetic Movement
Supervisor: Stefano Evangelista
Research interests: Aestheticism and Decadence, queer identity and community, prose stylistics and the essay, time and anachronism, material culture, visual culture, medievalism, Celticism
Doctoral research: 'An intellectually rich age such as ours [is] necessarily an eclectic one' (Walter Pater, 1889). Building upon my Oxford undergraduate dissertation on queer interior decoration in the fin de siècle (which won the Gibbs Prize for best dissertation), and Cambridge MPhil on queer gift-giving in the Aesthetic Movement (which won the Members' English Prize for best dissertation), I am now studying the uses of eclecticism as an attitude of judicious selection, combined with an embrace of otherness, that put specifically queer aesthetes at the forefront of artistic development. I have chapters on Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field and partners Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. My research is generously funded by an Oxford-Cecil Lubbock Scholarship.
Published Articles:
A. R. Gunn, '"A Strange Inverted Home-Sickness": Pater's Queer, Eclectic World-Building, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (Issue 9, Summer 2024)
A. R. Gunn, 'The Hare and His Heirs: The Non-Binary Aesthetic of Lamb, Pater, and Wilde', The Charles Lamb Bulletin, New Series No. 173 (Summer 2021), 26-43
Reviews:
A. R. Gunn, review of Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Bodies, Ecologies, ed. by Francesca Bratton, Megan Girdwood, and Fraser Riddell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) [forthcoming]
Alex Gunn, '2022 IWPS Conference Report: "Aestheticism: Sensations and Ideas"', Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (Issue 7, Winter 2022)
A. R. Gunn, 'Perkin's Purple to Greenery Yallery' [review of Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean], Cusp (Summer 2024)
Conferences:
'Tempus (re)fugit: Michael Field and Interior Decoration', INCS 2025: Speed and Acceleration (Genoa, June 2025)
'Perfect Sympathies: Lamb Among the Aesthetes', Charles Lamb 250th Anniversary Event (Bath Spa University, London, February 2025)
'Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up Worlds: The Influence of the 1890s on the 1960s', Oxford Modern and Contemporary Forum (2023)
'Escape Rooms: Queer Interior Decoration and Community in the Aesthetic Movement', International Walter Pater Society Conference (Iuav University, Venice, 14-16 June 2022): Aestheticism: Sensations and Ideas
'Discordia concors; or, the Embrace of Doubt', English Graduates at Oxford Conference (Oxford, 2 June 2023): Doubt
'"A Strange Inverted Home-Sickness": Pater's Queer World-Building', International Walter Pater Society Conference (Trinity College, Oxford, 26-27 June 2023): Walter Pater, The Renaissance, and Legacies of Aestheticism
Prizes:
Members' English Prize for best MPhil dissertation 2022
Gibbs Prize and Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for best dissertation in Final Honours School English 2021
Teaching:
Victorian paper, Modern paper, Late Medieval paper, Medieval Welsh lyric tutorials (for FHS Course II), Medieval Welsh romance tutorials (FHS Course II), Medieval Welsh (teaching assistant)
