Dr Stephen Turton, Gonville and Caius

smt75@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I work on the history of the English language and its intersections with society and literary culture from 1500 to the present. I have particular interests in 18th-century and Romantic British literature, lexicography, sexuality, gender, slang, and print censorship. My first book, Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. My current research projects are on:

  1. Philology and sexuality in Britain from 1700 to 1840, especially in the writing of Anne Lister, Byron, and Hester Lynch Piozzi.
  2. The manuscript revisions of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) by Francis Grose, one of the first standalone dictionaries of English slang.
  3. The making of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1859 to 1928. With Prof Charlotte Brewer, I am co-editing a digital edition of the correspondence of Sir James A. H. Murray, the first editor-in-chief of the OED (MurrayScriptorium.org).

On the English Tripos, I teach Part II, Paper 9, ‘Love, Gender, Sexuality: 1740–1824’. On the Linguistics Tripos, I teach Part I, Paper 4, ‘History and Varieties of English’.

Research Interests

  • History of English
  • 18th- and 19th-century British literature
  • History of gender
  • History of sexuality
  • Print censorship
  • World Englishes
  • Dictionaries
  • Sociolinguistics

Selected Publications

Book

  • 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Articles and essays

  • 2023. ‘My use of the word love’: Lister, language and the dictionary. In Caroline Gonda and Chris Roulston (Eds.), Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archive to Gentleman Jack (pp. 73–90). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • 2022. The lexicographical lesbian: Remaking the body in Anne Lister’s erotic glossary. Review of English Studies, 73(310), 537–551.
  • 2021 (with Charlotte Brewer). Aggravated mischief: Editing and digitizing the James A. H. Murray Papers. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 42(1), 259–280.
  • 2021. Segregating sex: Heterocentric discourse about intercourse in English dictionaries. Journal of Language and Discrimination, 5(1), 48–70.
  • 2021. Deadnaming as disformative utterance: The redefinition of trans womanhood on Urban Dictionary. Gender and Language, 15(1), 42–64.
  • 2020. Redefining realness: Bringing queer performativity to the English dictionary. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 9(2), 101–126.
  • 2020. The confessional sciences: Scientific lexicography and sexology in the Oxford English Dictionary. Language & History, 63(3), 214–232.
  • 2019. Unlawful entries: Buggery, sodomy, and the construction of sexual normativity in early English dictionaries. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 40(1), 81–112.
  • 2019. ‘Improper words’: Silencing same-sex desire in eighteenth-century general English dictionaries. Oxford Research in English, 8, 9–36.