A sixth-year graduate student at Yale, 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 of modernist fiction in England. 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.

With Andrew Goldstone, I run the Using Theory brown bag lunch series, a discussion group devoted to finding and exploring critical applications for literary theory (broadly construed). Graduate student or faculty volunteers select a theoretical text that has influenced their critical work and then lead an informal discussion of it over lunch. Minutes and discussion questions can be viewed here. This is Andrew Goldstone's website.

With Grace Leslie, I founded and continue to organize the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies working group. 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 Fall 2008 schedule for the WGSS working group and graduate colloquium is here.

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