Dr Frankie Dytor (they/them)

I work at the intersections of literature, art history, and gender studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

 I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Fellow in English at Exeter. I completed my PhD in History of Art in 2023 at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Caroline van Eck. I am currently turning my PhD research into a book, provisionally entitled Renaissance Lives: Decadent Aesthetes and the Queer Practices of Art History, 1880-1930. This work explores entanglements between art and life in cosmopolitan aesthetic encounters with the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance. I look at interior design, performance, fashion, and lifewriting.

My next project, with Prof. Jana Funke as my mentor, is entitled Aestheticism, Sexology, and the Making of Trans Feeling, 1870-1930. This explores trans imaginaries developed by figures associated with aestheticism and investigates their importance in the new discipline of sexual science. Centred around the sexologist Havelock Ellis's notion of 'sexo-aesthetic inversion' to describe trans experience and identity, the project writes a new history of fugitive, transitory, and imaginative trans life in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century.

I completed my BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge. During my PhD, I spent a year as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg. My work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Newton Trust, Lander Trust, Alfred Toepfer Foundation, British Association for Victorian Studies, Association for Art History, and Cambridge Society of Paris. Before starting at Exeter, I worked as a research assistant for Dr Lucy Ella Rose at Surrey University.