Dr Frankie Dytor (they/them)

I work at the intersections of art history, literature, and trans studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in queer and trans aesthetics, life practices, and worldmaking.

 I am a British Academy-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow. 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 this 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 aesthetic encounters with the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance. To do this, I look at scrapbooks, 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 the two-way traffic betwen sexual science and the visual arts in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. The project offers two major interventions: it writes the first account of trans aestheticism and decadence, and it recovers the legacy of this thought in the new discipline of sexology. 

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.

I am represented by Greene & Heaton.