Alex Gunn

Thesis title: Eclecticism: The Queer Philosophy Behind the Literary and Material Cultures of Aestheticism, c.1873-1900

Supervisor: Stefano Evangelista

Research interests: Aestheticism and Decadence, queer identity and community, prose stylistics and the essay, time and anachronism, material culture, visual culture, the long nineteenth century

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 Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for best dissertation), and Cambridge MPhil on queer gift-giving in the Aesthetic Movement, I am now studying eclecticism as a philosophy of selection, and embrace of otherness, that put specifically queer aesthetes at the forefront of artistic development.  My research is funded by an Oxford-Cecil Lubbock Scholarship.

Publications:

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, pp. 26-43)

Forthcoming: Alex Gunn, '2022 IWPS Conference Report: "Aestheticism: Sensations and Ideas"', Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (Issue 7, Winter 2022)

Conferences:

'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