Key people: Professor Jonathan Dollimore

“Jonathan Dollimore is unafraid to say what he thinks and feels, and the result reads like a liberation.” –  Times Literary Supplement 2017

Jonathan Dollimore pioneered cultural materialism; then he pioneered gay studies.  He subsequently turned his attention to a fresh interrogation of those dark, recalcitrant elements of desire and mortality which resist utopian transformation.  His influential books include Radical Tragedy (1984), Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (1998), Sex Literature and Censorship (2001) and, with Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare (1985).

Dollimore's most recent, path-breaking intervention is the powerfully personal Desire: a Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2017) of which Professor Ewan Fernie has written: “it will touch, haunt and break your heart...he tells [his story] with such discipline, delicacy and directness that, even as it becomes authoritatively his own, the story of his times starts to show through it, and then the story of mortal life and desire itself...An awe-inspiring achievement”. 

Dollimore has held professorships at the Universities of Sussex and York, and he has lectured and taught throughout the world.  This conference represents a unique opportunity to hear and respond to his thoughts about what is now needed.