Holly James Johnston

Holly James Johnston
DPhil Candidate
University College

Thesis title: Queer Origin Myths: Coming-of-Age in the Early Twentieth-Century    

Supervisor: Professor Michael Whitworth

 

Doctoral Research:

My research explores the question of queer causality in early twentieth-century Bildungsroman, studying Vita Sackville-West, Christopher St. John, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf. Reading the Bildungsroman as a type of origin myth, my research explores how the coming-of-age story became a repository for questions about what it meant to be queer. A recurring motif across the thesis is the blurring of fact and fiction to produce a more rich and complex view of queer selfhood. Continually, the thesis encounters fictional offshoots of real-life selves, demonstrating a desire on the part of queer authors to test the boundaries of selfhood and imagine the self otherwise in fiction. In turn, my thesis investigates why queer authors edited, embellished, or entirely changed their origins - constructing origin myths that 'ought' to be true, or better explain who the self has since become.

 

 

 

 

Other Projects:

  • Caravaggio, The National Gallery (2025). This short film explores the meaning behind Caravaggio's painting Boy Bitten by a Lizard.
  • Narcissus, The National Gallery (2024). This short film explores the queer artistic and literary legacies of the Narcissus myth.
  • Into That World Inverted (2023). In this podcast series, two friends set off on a road trip of the South East of England to unearth and explore its queer histories.
  • Recreating Saint Sebastian, The National Gallery (2022). This short film reimagines queer icon Saint Sebastian as a drag king.
  • Orlando in Lockdown (2020). This photo series imagines how the eponymous hero/heroine of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) would have spent lockdown.
  • The Art of Being a Dandy, Tate (2020). A short film about drag, dandyism, and the artist Aubrey Beardsley, in conversation with curator and art historian Stephen Calloway.

 

Radio:

 

Teaching:

  • I was the Course Leader for the 'A Queer History of Art' course at the V&A Academy in 2024.
  • At Oxford, I have taught on Prelims 4 at Merton College and St. Peter's College, I have supervised undergraduate dissertations in both the English Faculty and the History of Art Faculty, and I have been a Graduate Teaching Assistant on Paper 6.
  • I previously taught at the Sotheby's Institute of Art.

 

Research Interests:

Modernist Literature and Culture; Queer History; Queer Art History; Decadence and Aestheticism; Victorian Studies; History of Sexuality; Humanism; Narrative Form.

 

Education:

  • MSt in English (1900 – Present), University of Oxford (Distinction)
  • BA in English, University College London (First Class Honours)

 

More examples of my work can be found on Instagram @orlandrag_