Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow
Michael Reid’s (English) dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the lived experience of gay men in eighteenth-century England. Using a range of contemporary historical and literary texts including criminal biographies, minor Gothic novels, trial records, broadsides, political and personal satires, versified love letters, newspaper accounts, commonplace books, wills, and more, he presents a series of case studies that untangle some of the most mysterious and least interpretable materials in the human record: a labyrinth of double entendres, redacted names, false trails. His research not only illuminates the what of the historical past, but also provides an interpretive framework of the how it may be understood in a closer and more intimate sense. Supervisor: Simon Dickie, FAS English.
What I'm working on: Dangerous Pleasures: Literature, Secrecy, and Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England