Events

Imagining Queer Identities in Nineteenth-Century Music and Literature

– an online roundtable for LGBT+ History Month –

Wednesday 21st February 2024  |  1500-1600 GMT / 1000-1100 EST

This roundtable will reflect on recent research in musicology, history and literary studies on music, queer identities and the body in the nineteenth-century. It celebrates the publication of Kristin Franseen’s Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023), bringing her work into conversation with developments in queer theory and the history of sexuality.

Imagining Musical Pasts explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880-1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars: philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson.

Identifying the coded references, careful nuances, and intentional and accidental gaps that make ambiguity an inherent feature of these sources requires an awareness of multiple approaches to music history beyond biography and historiography, intersecting as it does with literary scholarship, art history, the histories of science and medicine, and sound studies.

Dr Kristin Franseen will introduce her monograph, followed by responses and reflections from Dr Shannon Draucker and Dr Fraser Riddell.

On Zoom: https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/94305482967?pwd=cEJvWkFDWk9YQkZXZXdleWIrSlc0UT09

Meeting ID: 943 0548 2967 | Passcode: 645169

Dr Kristin Franseen is FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Concordia University, Canada. Her research centres on the place of identity, gossip, and fiction in the histories of musicology, music theory, and music biography. Her monograph Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson was published by Clemson University Press in 2023. Her other publications include articles in 19th-Century Music and Music and Letters, and a book chapter in Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, and Drama: The Making of a Movement (Routledge, 2021).

Dr Shannon Draucker is Assistant Professor in English at Siena College, New York.  Her research focuses on the intersections among Victorian literature; music; the history of science; and gender, sexuality, and queer theory. Her first book, Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature will be published by SUNY Press in July 2024. Her other research includes articles in Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and Victorian Periodicals Review. Public-facing pieces, especially about classical music, have appeared in Public Books, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Review of Books blog (BLARB>).  

Dr Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK.  
His research focuses on gender, sexuality and the body in late-nineteenth century literature. Publications include Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and articles in Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture and Volupté. A chapter on queer pastoral soundscapes was recently published in The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form (Routledge). Forthcoming work includes Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Ecologies, Bodies (Palgrave), co-edited with Megan Girdwood and Francesca Bratton. He is co-lead of the interdisciplinary ‘Affective Experience Lab’ at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham.