Alex Gunn
Thesis title: Living Arrangements: Queer Uses of Eclecticism in the Literature and Material Culture of the British Aesthetic Movement, c. 1867-1900
Supervisor: Stefano Evangelista
Research interests: Aestheticism and Decadence, Arts and Crafts, queer identity and community, style, time and anachronism, material culture, visual culture, medievalism, Celticism, theology and religion
Doctoral research: 'An intellectually rich age such as ours [is] necessarily an eclectic one' (Walter Pater, 1888). 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, in literature and interior decoration, as a way of resisting the materialist ideologies that reduced queer people to diseased, degenerate bodies. 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:
'The Relics of "Saint Charles": Sainthood, Materiality, and the Desire for the Past', BARS 2026 (Birmingham, July 2026)
'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:
Prelims: Paper 3 (1830-1910), Paper 4 (1910-Present), Paper 1B (Approaches to Literature)
FHS: Tutorials for Course II (Medieval Welsh romance and lyric poetry); Teaching Assistant for FHS Paper 6 Medieval Welsh; Dissertation supervision
Visiting Students: Modern (1910-Present), Romanticism, Late Medieval (1350-1550), Medieval Welsh and its Afterlives, Arthurian Literature from Medieval Wales to Monty Python
