‘By twenty-five I knew it was brighter to be queer and alive...’

Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion (2000), p. 256

In the 1960s, while a student at King’s College London, Derek Jarman took his first steps into London’s queer mirror world and began a varied and dazzling career. Before his death in 1994 his relentless creative output comprised journals, poems, memoirs, paintings and sculpture, installation art, films and his famous garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness in Kent. Often confrontational and never shy, he provides a unique perspective that challenges us to think and act queerly.

To mark the thirtieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death in 1994, King’s College London and Queer@King’s invite PGR students and early-career researchers to a half-day event to discuss their work, their shared points of interest, and how queer thinking might shift and change within the academy in the future. The workshop will comprise a series of panels that will allow attendees to discuss their research, finding points of commonality and alliance, and will end with a round-table discussion on the position of queer studies in the current academic climate.

Drawing inspiration from Jarman’s own diverse artistic output and his many and varied interests, we invite submissions from postgraduate researchers and early-career thinkers on:

• Jarman’s life and work
• Queer environmental and ecological thinking
• Queer practises of place-making and domesticity
• Queer urbanism
• Structures of queer pedagogy and mentoring
• Overlooked or forgotten members of the ‘queer canon’
• Intermedial artists, or figures working across both literature and the visual arts

Please send a short bio and an abstract of up to 250 words to samuel.bradley@kcl.ac.uk by 15th November 2024. If you have any other questions about the day please do get in touch.

The workshop will be held at KCL's Waterloo campus, in the Franklin Wilkins Building, room 2.45. Lunch and a light reception will be provided.