Dr Diarmuid Hester, Emmanuel
deh40@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a research associate of Emmanuel College. I grew up in County Kilkenny, Ireland, and received my BA from University College Dublin before coming to the UK to study for MA degrees in Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change (University of Sussex) and Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy). I completed my PhD in English at the University of Sussex and I was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in English at Cambridge from 2017-2020. I’ve held research fellowships at New York University, the Library of Congress, University of Oxford, and the British Library.
In 2020, I became a BBC-AHRC New Generation Thinker, defined as an academic who ‘brings the best of university research and scholarly ideas to a broad audience through the media and public engagement’. I've talked about my work on TV, radio, and podcasts; at film screenings, music festivals, and team-building events for multi-nationals. Since arriving at Cambridge, I created A Great Recorded History: Queer Cambridge Audio Trail, a free audio trail that reveals the LGBTQ+ history of the city via literary excerpts and oral history interviews. I'm also one of the organisers of Club Urania, a monthly performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and allies at Cambridge Junction.
I teach modern and contemporary literature at Cambridge, and I've supervised UG and PG dissertations on a range of topics, mostly queer literature and culture. I run the MPhil specialist seminar '20, rue Jacob: Space, Gender, & Sexuality between the Wars.'
Research Interests
My first book, Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper (University of Iowa Press, 2020) is a career retrospective of one of the United States' most innovative and controversial writers. It also offers a theoretically-informed cultural history of numerous vital, under-recognised American subcultural scenes. Synthesising close readings, new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, and in-depth archival research, Wrong has been critically acclaimed in mainstream media and academic journals alike. In the TLS, Rona Cran said: 'rather than being hagiographical, it is predicated on the intimate act of paying close attention to someone else… Bright with Cooper's personality and with Hester's, Wrong is a warm (and radical) embrace.' In American Literary History, James Annesley wrote that Wrong 'shows how scholars can read the dynamics of avant-garde practice in the contemporary period by considering the creative scene alongside the primary material', and praised it as a model of future scholarship. Wrong has been credited with a revival of interest in critical biography as a form, and is cited as a major influence on a number of forthcoming biographies.
I built on this interest in biographical writing with my second book, Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2023). It considers the relationship between sexuality and place in the twentieth century by exploring the importance of certain locations, cities, and landscapes in the lives and works of artists and writers such as E.M. Forster, Josephine Baker, Claude Cahun, James Baldwin, and Jack Smith. The writer Colm Tóibín said: 'Nothing Ever Just Disappears is about what happens to a house or a room, or a whole town or city, when it is transformed by a powerful sensibility. With originality and subtlety, Diarmuid Hester examines how the gay imagination deals with place and with displacement, allowing for mystery and a kind of magic.' The book was warmly received in the press and in his review in The Irish Times, Neil Hegarty wrote: 'The great gift of this book is to offer access to optimism in these late and shadowed days. It provides a glimpse, a possibility for transformation, and an escape from the closed and shuttered spaces of late capitalism; and it suggests that we may be able to save ourselves by rethinking our lives and imaginations, our societies and systems—by queering our world.' Nothing Ever Just Disappears was published in North America by Pegasus Books in 2024.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
- Gender and sexuality studies
- Queer subcultural production
- Waste, politics and culture of
- New York School poetry and its legacies
Selected Publications
Books
Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2023; New York: Pegasus Books, 2024
Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020
Edited Collections
New Narrative Now, a special issue of Textual Practice marking the 25th anniversary of Gregory W. Bredbeck's landmark Textual Practice essay, 'The New Queer Narrative: Intervention and Critique'. Co-edited with Kasia Boddy (2022)
Articles and Essays
'LGBTQ Bestsellers' (with Jack Parlett), The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature. Ed. Benjamin Kahan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024
‘Dennis Cooper’, in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980-2020. Eds. Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen J. Burn, and Lesley Larkin. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022. View online
'"At each remove the similarity fades a bit more": queer politics and experimental prose in two generations of New Narrative', Textual Practice (2021) View online
'Cruising Wojnarowicz', Critical Quarterly, 62:3 (2020): 126-132 View online
'A poetics of dissociability: poetry and punk in Los Angeles 1976-1983', American Literature, 91:1 (2019): 183-207 View online
'The anarcho-queer commons of Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings: a brief history', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 24:4 (2018): 522-527 View online
'Highway to hell? Images of the American road in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek’s Cutoff', Journal of American Studies, 52:3 (2018): 810-827 View online
'Humor, gentrification, and the conservation of Downtown New York in Lynne Tillman's No Lease on Life', Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers. Ed. Sabrina Fuchs Abrams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 135-153
