about the author
Hello! I’m Emily Rutherford, a historian-in-training of the intellectual and literary worlds of Europe and America in the long nineteenth century, on the verge of receiving my BA in History (with a certificate, or minor, in American Studies) from Princeton. My undergraduate work has ranged widely over the western canon, but has primarily focused on theories of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Britain and America. My senior thesis is an intellectual biography of a 19th-century British man of letters called John Addington Symonds, who was pivotal in shaping modern understandings of male homosexual identity. Through a careful situation of Symonds’ life and work in the context of the great Victorian debates about religion and science, about aesthetics and ethics, about the familial, the social, and the individual, about the construction of the modern academy and the construction of modern sexuality, I attempt both to revise the existing, problematic vision of Symonds as the herald of gay liberation and to make more universal observations about the place of desire and love in the Victorian intellectual world.
In the autumn, I’ll be taking up a place to read for an MPhil in Modern British and European History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where I hope to continue to think about the intersections of desire and love with the history of the university, the reception of the classical tradition, radical and utopian thought, and the birth of psychoanalysis and other ways of understanding individual interiority. Until then, I’ll be reading outdoors in the sunshine, cooking vegetarian food, trying to learn the rudiments of dead languages, and lingering in long conversations at the dinner table or at the pub.
I’ve been keeping this blog since the spring of 2009, my second semester of university, and so it has been very much a record of what I’ve learned and thought, and how I’ve grown and changed, in the course of my higher education. I post quotations from my reading, but also longer essays that tend to be autobiographical in nature. Most, though not all, of what you read is true; none of it is said on behalf of any university to which I am connected. If you’re particularly interested in what the kind of writing I do here is about, I recommend you read “Why I Write: An Introduction.”
Comments, questions, criticisms, corrections, and greetings can be sent to me via email.
