Desmond Huthwaite, Fitzwilliam

Biographical Information

I did a BA in English and German Literature at Warwick, then an MPhil in 18th-century and Romantic Studies at Cambridge, where I still somehow am.

Research Interests

18th century/Romantic-related: 18ct science and philosophy; material and dress culture; the queer eighteenth century; embodiment and (human, textual) bodies; criticism in all its forms; the concept and sociology of literature in the 18ct; the 1790s; both Shelleys; Erasmus Darwin; most women authors; Gothic.

Not 18th century/Romantic-related: feminism; anything queer/gay/lesbian/trans/sexy/gendery; the literature/philosophy of clothes, fashion and photography; Kathy Acker; contemporary poetry; literary criticism (especially literary reviewing, the essay, memoir, ‘creative criticism’); Gothic and goths; much (except Hegel) Germanophone literature and cinema, but especially (respectively) Kafka and Jelinek, and Fassbinder and Herzog.

Selected Publications

My greatest contribution to scholarship in my field is this history-cum-taxonomy of the word ‘saucebox’ in the eighteenth century.

More recently I have published “More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve. Humanities 2021, 10, 98. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10030098

And a preview of forthcoming attractions:

‘The (Ongoing) Biography of an Evil Twin’, Edinburgh Companion to Queer Studies (provisional title), eds Jeremy Chow and Declan Kavanagh (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

‘Fairy Forms in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya’, ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ conference edited collection, eds. Sam George and William Hughes (forthcoming).