Event items
LGBTQ+ History Month Lecture: Queer beyond London: LGBTQ lives in Brighton, Leeds, Manchester and Plymouth by Professor Matt Cook
Professor Matt Cook, University of Oxford
Date/Time: Tuesday 4 March 2025, 5.30pm
Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University
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All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 25 February. |
Chaired by Dr Gareth Longstaff, Faculty Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Queer urban life has changed dramatically: shifts in the economy, culture, attitudes, and technology have all played their part. London has often been used as the barometer but an exploration of the queer contours of Leeds, Manchester, Brighton and Plymouth shows how and why LGBTQ scenes, communities and identities could feel very different from place to place.
Biography
Matt is a social and cultural historian specialising in LGBT and queer history. His books include London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003), A Gay History of Britain (lead author; 2007), Queer Domesticities (2014), Queer Beyond London (with Alison Oram; 2022) and Writing Queer History (forthcoming 2024). He has also co-edited five further books and contributed to a range of leading history journals and has been an editor of History Workshop Journal since 2002.
He appears regularly on radio, occasionally on TV, and have acted as a consultant on a number of films, documentaries and stage shows. Matt has also advised on a wide range of LGBTQ+ community history, archive, museum and heritage projects, including for the nightclub Duckie, The National Trust, the Museum of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum. He is currently visiting researcher and project adviser for the Norwegian Queerdom initiative based at the University of Bergen.
Matt joined Oxford’s Faculty of History and Mansfield College as the inaugural Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexuality in October 2023. Prior to that he spent 18 years at Birkbeck, University of London, latterly as Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. Whilst at Birkbeck he directed the Raphael Samuel History Centre for eight years and convened the Gender and Sexuality Studies MA/MSc. I
Matt’s research is in queer, urban, public, oral, community and local history. He is fascinated by cross-period, transnational, comparative and cross-disciplinary work. He has worked especially on: urban queer cultures (especially London): the AIDS crisis: queer domesticity: queer arts and culture: and LGBTQ+ public history and heritage.
