Text, Artifact, Identity: Horace Walpole and the queer eighteenth century

Hosted in collaboration between:
Department of English, St Mary’s University, Twickenham
The National Trust
Strawberry Hill House
This conference will bring together scholars and curators from the disciplines of Literature, Cultural History, Art and Architectural History, and Heritage to investigate LGBTQ perspectives on the ‘long’ eighteenth century.

Hosted inside Horace Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in west London, it will complement a major exhibition taking place October 2018-March 2019, ‘The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’, which will bring together, for the first time since 1842, masterpieces from Walpole’s collection.

Confirmed speakers

Matthew Reeve (Queen’s University, Canada)
George Haggerty (University of California, Riverside)
Alison Oram (Leeds Beckett University)
Ulf R Hansson (University of Texas at Austin)
Daniel Orrells (Kings College London)
We invite papers exploring any aspect of queer history, culture, heritage and writing of the ‘long’ eighteenth century; there will be a particular but not exclusive focus on Horace Walpole and his circle. Please see the full Call for Papers below.

The conference will take place in the beautiful Georgian and Victorian Gothic rooms of Strawberry Hill, and there will be a formal dinner in Strawberry Hill House.