My DPhil project is supervised by Professor Santanu Das and jointly funded by the AHRC, Clarendon Fund, and Queen’s College. My research explores the explores the poetic, publishing, and archival networks that formed in response to the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom, attending to the poetic legacies of AIDS and interrogating the afterlives of these collections in the face of cultural amnesia and public ignorance. By examining collections published between 1981-1994, I trace the emergence of the ‘gay anthology’ in Britain, mainly exploring the output of small publishing presses, such as Gay Men’s Press and Oscars Press. I consider these texts as sites of community building and materialisations of networks of queer kinship and care that emerged from the crisis. By examining moments of lyric recession and archival lacunae, I will explore the aesthetic, rhetorical and biomedical threats to queer survival endured during the HIV epidemic. I am also concerned with the places where such poetry was read and performed: where it became present in the community, and what ‘work’ these readings were doing.
I completed my BA at University of Oxford and my MA at University College London.