Professor William Spurlin
Honorary Professor

Research area(s)

• Queer studies
• Gender studies
• Postcolonial studies (with an emphasis on gender, queer, and/or Africa)
• Critical theory
• African or African-American studies
• Comparative literature or translation (with an emphasis on gender or queer)
• Diaspora/migration/border studies (with in an emphasis on gender or queer)
• 20th century/modernist/postmodernist literatures/cultures

Research Interests

Professor Spurlin's interdisciplinary research in queer studies, postcolonial studies, and critical/cultural theory encompasses the analysis of a broad range of literary, cultural, and critical texts ranging from the fin de siècle through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Trained in comparative literature and critical theory, the texts with which he works cross national, geographic, and linguistic borders and include not only British and American texts, but those located within francophone and Germanic cultures, southern Africa, and the wider African diaspora. His recent work, particularly his book Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006), funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, has contributed to the formulation new theoretical thinking at the nexus of postcolonial and queer enquiry. His latest monograph, Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), builds on his postcolonial work by focusing specifically on the interwar period, marked by the decline of European imperialism in the colonies and the simultaneous rise of totalitarianism within Europe, especially German fascism. This book examines the racialisation of homosexuality in another racist regime, that of National Socialism, which was also underwritten by a politics of gender and eugenics in a similar, but not reducible, way that it was under colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, and within some forms of postcolonial nationalism in Africa and elsewhere that continue to racialise homosexuality as a vestige of empire. This project was supported by a one-year sabbatical in 2004 whilst at Cardiff University and by a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). His recent monograph project Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb, published in 2022 by Rowman & Littlefield, analyses how writers such as Rachid O., Eyet-Chekib Djaziri, Abdellah Taia, and Nina Bouraoui foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings of negotiations of multiple languages, histories, and cultures, alongside crossings of gender and sexuality.  By writing in French, the book argues that the writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser, but inflecting a European language with discursive turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experiences of gender and sexual alterity--a form of (queer) translational practice that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

Professor Spurlin has published over sixty essays in queer studies, postcolonial studies, African studies, feminist theory, and comparative literature and culture. His work has been instrumental in formulating the new discipline of queer translation studies, especially through guest-editing, by invitation, a special issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies in 2014 on the gender and sexual politics of translation. He has given invited lectures on his work in France; most recently at Univ de Paris XIII, at the Centre d' Études des Discours, Images, Textes, Écrits, et Communications at Univ de Paris XII, at the College International de Philosophie, and at the Sorbonne, as well as in South Africa, Singapore, China, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, across North America, and in other parts of the world. Professor Spurlin has also lectured in medical/clinical contexts on queer theory and biomedical practice at NHS Trust-funded symposia on sexual health, and in medical research centres and hospitals, on topics pertaining to the cultural politics of biomedicine and sexuality, STIs, and HIV/AIDS care. He chaired the Comparative Gender Studies Committee at the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) from 2010-2016, and he was a member of the ICLA Executive Council from 2010-2022. He served as an appointed member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from 2007-2016, and has served on the boards of several academic journals. For the outstanding contribution of his scholarship to social science research and thinking, Professor Spurlin was nominated and named a Fellow of the British Academy for the Social Sciences (FAcSS) in 2017.

Professor Spurlin's research has also addressed critically the pedagogical situation from the perspectives of cultural studies and queer theory. This work includes an edited volume Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English: Positions, Pedagogies, and the Politics of Culture (2000) and an invited guest editorship of a special issue of the American journal College English on 'Lesbian and Gay Studies: Queer Pedagogies' in 2002. Both works attempt to engage (queer) difference(s) as a means of enabling radical re-readings of the public space of the classroom through which to envision more participatory spheres of critical deliberation. He continues to remain interested in, and dedicated to, this work both as a teacher and as a public intellectual, and he is especially concerned about the role of the humanities and queer studies in academic and public life. Professor Spurlin was named Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) in 2009 for excellence in teaching. In 2016, he was awarded Principal Fellow (PFHEA), the most senior level of Fellowship conferred by the Academy, for his exceptional record of strategic leadership in teaching at institutional level, in the UK higher education sector, and internationally for the global reach and breadth of his published scholarship in queer pedagogy, which has influenced teaching practices worldwide evident through its sustained and continued international citation and review.