Department of English

The seminar will bring together the study of early modern English literature and culture with histories and theories of gender, sexuality and race. Contact with  ‘the East’ (Turkey, the Moluccas, North Africa and India) and the West (the Americas and the Caribbean) reshaped attitudes to identity and desire. How does this history allow us to understand, and often interrogate, modern theories of desire and difference? Conversely, how do postcolonial and other contemporary perspectives allow us to re-read this past?