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Photo of  Chloë Edwards

Chloë Edwards

PhD Student

I am a PhD student based in Art History & Visual Culture. Currently, I am working on my thesis entitled Listen Without Prejudice: Queer Masculinities in the Popular Music Culture of Thatcher’s Britain, which explores the ways in which masculinity and male (homo)sexuality were depicted, challenged, and expressed in British pop music within the socio-political context of the Thatcher era (1979-1990). My research employs wide-ranging analysis of the period and relevant popular music cultures, utilising a rich variety of archival resources involving press and televisual material, music videos, as well as promotional ephemera such as vinyl records.

My research interests include depictions of post-war Britain in literature and film, late twentieth-century British and American visual art, cultural studies, and I am particularly interested in contemporary gender and sexuality studies, specifically queer studies.

I obtained my undergraduate degree from the University of Exeter in BA English & German (2019), and my MA English Literature (Gender & Sexuality) from Cardiff University (2020).

Since beginning my PhD, I have presented my research at various conferences, including: the 2023 Subcultures Network International Conference (University of the West of England); the 2022 Punk Scholars Network UK Conference and Postgraduate Symposium (Middlesex University London); and the 2022 Outside/rs Conference (University of Brighton), publishing an article in an accompanying 2023 special issue of journal Excursions (University of Sussex).

In 2022, I was kindly awarded the Niklaus-Cartwright Bursary and the Company of Arts Scholars Charitable Trust’s Arts Scholars Award, funding archival visits to multiple sites in Manchester and London.

In the 2023/24 academic year, I am working towards completing the Learning and Teaching in Higher Education programme with the University of Exeter’s School of Education, to gain my accreditation with the ASPIRE Framework and Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Outside of my research, I have served as Co-Editor for the University’s postgraduate journal Exclamat!on. I also have peer-reviewed articles for the journals of the University of Glasgow, University of Warwick, and University of Edinburgh, and contributed to Wales Arts Review, covering the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival in 2021. I have also worked with The Brilliant Club and the University of Oxford’s OxNet event, supporting their aims of broadening the accessibility of higher education to students nationwide.

I am also a Research Culture Assistant within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and have collaboratively created a PGR Gender and Sexuality Research Group to facilitate interdisciplinary network opportunities and sharing of interests.

To date, I have also taught on multiple undergraduate modules within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, including supporting field trips to London and Berlin.

In the 2023/24 academic year, I will be teaching on the following modules:

  • AHV2007 – Contemporary Visual Practices
  • AHV2015 – Art History and Visual Culture Field Study for Blended Learning
  • EAS1034 – Film Studies: An Introduction

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