Dr Declan Kavanagh
About
Declan Gilmore-Kavanagh is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century literature and Director of the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Writing. He researches sexuality and masculinities in eighteenth-century literature and culture. He has recently completed a book, Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain, which examines how the discourse of effeminacy shaped the emergence of the modern political subject during the Enlightenment. His next project, “Swift’s Blindness”, brings into sharp relief the ways in which the Enlightenment period gave rise to our current, tacitly held, understandings of the concepts of “sight” and “vision”. He teaches a seminar (on the Medical Humanities MA programme) on the representation of sexually transmitted diseases in libertine literature.