Piers Haslam
My doctoral research explores meanings and experiences of lifelong bachelorhood in Britain from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, a period that has attained a pivotal status within histories of homosexuality. By taking a ‘queer critical’ approach to a diverse sample of diaries, letters, and autobiographies, my research confronts the opacities of desire and subjectivity in the past, suggesting new ways of approaching the history of sexuality, or even of displacing the primacy of sexuality as an explanatory concept. My project is supervised by Dr Ben Griffin and funded by an Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Partnership.
Before coming to Cambridge, I graduated with a first-class BA in History from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020) and twice won the Peter Galloway Prize as recognition of my high grades. I completed my MSt in Modern British History at the University of Oxford (2022), receiving a first for my dissertation ‘Debating the Bachelor Tax: Singleness, Masculinity, and Social Anxiety in England, 1900–1945’ and earning a distinction overall.
I am also a co-convenor of the Cultural History Workshop.
Gender history, history of sexuality, queer and trans history, and history of subjectivity.
Paper O7 - Modern Britain and Ireland, 1750–present.
‘Is the Confirmed Bachelor Queer?’, Queer and Trans Philologies Conference, University of Cambridge, March 2024.
‘The Sorrows of Gilbert Harding: A Cultural History of Confirmed Bachelorhood in Modern Britain’, Cultural History Workshop, University of Cambridge, June 2023.
‘Bachelorhood and Queer History: Problems and Approaches’, Doing Queer and Trans Histories, University of Oxford, February 2022.
‘Quentin Crisp’s Last Word: Shifting Identities and Trans Resonances in Twentieth-Century Britain’, From Margins to Centre Conference, University of York, February 2020.