about the author
I’m Emily Rutherford and I’m a senior at Princeton University, studying intellectual and cultural history. I also dabble in English literature and American and European cultural studies. I spend most of my time writing a very long BA thesis about the life and work of a 19th-century British historian called John Addington Symonds, who (I argue) was a pivotal figure in the intellectual history of male homosexuality. (I also argue that there is such a thing as the intellectual history of male homosexuality.) When I’m not sitting in my carrel in the basement of the university library, I take classes in history, English, and related fields, work upstairs in the library as a cataloguing assistant, live in the dorms as an RA, participate in extracurricular seminars and reading groups, dabble in university policy, and cook and socialize at a vegetarian co-op. I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Sometimes I also sleep.
After I graduate, I will be doing an MPhil in Modern British and European History at Oxford. For the moment, I’m going to continue to work on the intellectual history of male homosexuality in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, but eventually I hope to pursue other interests in the reception of the classical tradition and the history of classics teaching; the history of the historical profession; the history of university policy, politics, and coeducation; and the history of radical and utopian thought, all in a transatlantic context.
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.
