How are scholars writing histories of lesbianism today? Queer@King’s welcomes Tamara Chaplin, Rebecca Jennings, and Amy Tooth Murphy for a presentation of their new work and an exploration of the questions and concepts they are engaging with in their research. What are the challenges and opportunities for doing this work in the present moment? How do explorations of lesbian desire, identities, cultures and communities shed light on broader historical questions of social marginalisation and political culture? If you are interested in queer history, gender identity, trans studies, or histories of women, feminism, or subaltern communities, join us for a lively conversation about the state of the field.

This panel discussion will be chaired by Zeena Feldman. A Q&A and drinks reception will follow.

About the speakers

Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chaplin is a scholar of sexualities, gender, and the media in modern France and the Francophone world. Her research interests include queer identities, social justice, war, and human rights. Her first book was Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (U Chicago Press, 2007). Chaplin’s publications appear in French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality and in edited collections in French, English, Spanish, and Catalan. Her co-edited volume (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), The Global Sixties: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture, appeared with Routledge in 2017. Chaplin’s new book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press) was published this December. A former professional ballet dancer and trained actor, Dr Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University (NJ) and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).

Rebecca Jennings is Professor of Modern Gender History at UCL. Her research focuses on twentieth-century British and Australian lesbian history and she is particularly interested in notions of selfhood and subjectivity; personal testimonies and oral history; intimacy, kinship and family life; cultural representations of lesbianism; and sexual subcultures. She is the author of Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A lesbian history of post-war Britain (Manchester University Press, 2007), Unnamed Desires: A Sydney lesbian history (Monash University Publishing, 2015) and Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life: Desire, domesticity and kinship in Britain and Australia 1945-2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). Rebecca is currently working on a project exploring the entanglement of gendered and sexual subjectivities in post-war Britain.

Amy Tooth Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in queer oral history. Her research interests include queer oral history theory and method, post-war lesbian history, butch/femme identities and culture, and queer temporalities. She is co-editor of a special issue of Oral History on ‘LGBTQ+ Lives: History, Identity and Belonging’ (2020), New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Desire (Routledge, 2022), and Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender, and Subjectivity (Routledge, 2024). She has published on a range of topics, including queer oral history theory and practice, intersubjectivity, lesbian domesticity, lesbian pulp fiction, and lesbian reading practices. Her current British Academy/Leverhulme-funded monograph project, ‘Historicising Butch: Narrating Butch Lesbian Identity, 1950-Present’, is an examination of butch lived experience in the UK and US via oral history interviews.

Zeena Feldman is Director of Queer@King’s Research Centre and Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research examines how digital technologies impact understandings and performances of traditionally analogue concepts – for instance, belonging, identity and wellbeing. She has published widely, including anthologies with Routledge and IB Tauris/Bloomsbury and in Information, Communication & Society; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Feminist Media Studies; Sexualities; Celebrity Studies; TripleC; The Independent, OpenDemocracy, and The Conversation. Zeena currently runs the Quitting Social Media project, which explores digital detox and digital overload.