Brown Bag Biography with Dr. Emily West
November 19, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Zoom
“Materializing Queer Genealogies at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hillâ€
Dr. Emily West, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa Cosponsored by the Department of History and Hamilton Library
Meeting ID: 954 9489 9581
Password: kZYY3y
This talk focuses on Horace Walpole, a key figure in the history of the Gothic through his authorship of the first Gothic fiction (1764's The Castle of Otranto) and his design of a faux-Medieval castle at Strawberry Hill in London. Through a close reading of one artifact from Strawberry Hill -- a lantern designed to create Gothic atmosphere at the home's entrance -- I trace how Walpole appropriates the materials of genealogical projection to generate instead queer forms of intimacy, inheritance, and temporality. The lantern's material aesthetics illuminate how Walpole's Gothic functions as a fundamentally queer form committed to destabilizing dominant enlightenment models of history, futurity, and linear time: models conceptually premised on the heteropatriarchal family’s generational continuity.
Emily West is an assistant professor in the English Department at 51²è¹Ý Manoa. Her current research focuses on eighteenth-century science and technology, gender and sexuality, material culture, and childhood, on which she has published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus
More Information
Zoë E. Sprott, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu,
