A Ph.D. candidate in the Yale English Department, I specialize in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature, literary and cultural modernism, gender and sexuality studies, and medical science and the arts. My dissertation, entitled "Forming the Normal: Sexology and the British Novel, 1890-1939," proposes sexology, a scientific field that first appeared in Europe in the 1880s, as a crucial influence on the evolution Anglo-Irish fiction of the early twentieth century. Reading scientific texts alongside novels, I examine how selected works by Wells, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf revise nineteenth-century narrative paradigms in response to the reinvention by sexologists of concepts such as female desire, childhood development, and masturbation. While completing my dissertation, I have embarked on a second project that examines the intersection of race, class, and sexuality in public health: a comparative study of AIDS and contemporary Anglophone literature. As part of this project, I am completing an article on the connection between authorship and infection in Phaswane Mpe's 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow.

With Andrew Goldstone, I ran the Using Theory brown bag lunch series, a discussion group devoted to finding and exploring critical applications for literary theory (broadly construed), from 2007 until the spring of 2009. In this discussion series, graduate student or faculty volunteers selected a theoretical text that had influenced their critical work and then led an informal discussion of it over lunch. The group has now become part of the Theory and Media Studies Colloquium, one of five official colloquia in the English Department. Minutes and discussion questions from many of the Using Theory meetings can be viewed online here. This is Andrew Goldstone's website. Andrew and I recently organized a seminar at the MSA titled "The New Twentieth Century Studies: Modernist Studies without Modernism," and we are currently at work on a manifesto with the same title.

With Grace Leslie, I founded the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies working group, and I organized the group from 2007 to 2009, when Molly Farrell took it over. This is Molly Farrell's website. An outgrowth of the WGSS Graduate Colloquium, this group aims to foster discussion of current issues in queer theory and gender studies among graduate students from a variety of academic fields. The 2009-2010 schedule for the WGSS working group and graduate colloquium is here.

Contact me via email: colin dot gillis at sign yale dot edu