SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE, SEXUAL HISTORY

This interdisciplinary, collaborative research project is pioneering a new direction for the history of sexuality, applying the approaches and methodologies of the emerging discipline of Classical Reception to the study of the ways that ideas about sex and sexuality have developed in recent centuries.

It explores issues such as why and how people throughout history have turned to the past in order to make sense of sexual experience, what kinds of authority the past has exercised in popular and scholarly debates about sexual practices, identities, civilization and morality, and how changing interpretations of past sexualities reflect historical shifts in the way sex is understood.

The project's aim is to elucidate the complex links between constructed 'knowledge' about human sexuality and the contested interpretations of material from past cultures which seems to give us evidence about their sexual practices and ideologies.  The knowledge in question ranges from the popular to the academic, from medicine and sexology to the heated debates taking place in internet chat-rooms, from theological ethics to Hollywood films.

We envisage the Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project ranging widely across historical periods, national boundaries and different kinds of source material, as well as existing scholarly disciplines. To this end we hope to attract scholars from a wide variety of disciplines worldwide to participate in the project’s broad-ranging remit, and to enable and develop a large-scale collaboration and exchange of ideas that will realise the potential of a subject which encompasses such a range of academic specialisms and bodies of source material.