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 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.  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)

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

'Discordia concors; or, the Embrace of Doubt', English Graduates at Oxford Conference (Oxford, 2 June 2023): Doubt

[Upcoming:] '"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