Piers Haslam

I am a PhD student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. My research explores meanings and experiences of ‘confirmed’ bachelorhood in Britain from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, a period that has attained a pivotal status within histories of homosexuality. By taking a ‘queer critical’ approach to a range of diaries, letters, and autobiographies, my research confronts the opacities of desire and subjectivity in the past, suggesting new ways of approaching the history of sexuality, or even of displacing the primacy of sexuality as an explanatory concept. I received my BA in History from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2020, before completing my MSt in Modern British History at Wadham College, Oxford in 2022. My PhD project is supervised by Dr Ben Griffin, and is generously co-funded by the University of Cambridge.