Jesse Gauthier is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature. Jesse's doctoral project combines archival research, theoretical interventions in queer theory and Marxist theory, and close readings of select poems and novels to uncover the discursive entangling of queerness and liberalism, communism, and other constituents of the mid-twentieth century anti-fascist movement. More specifically, his dissertation's innovative queer reading of interwar (1918–1939) literature uncovers an historical relationship between left-wing radical politics and queer identities that is broader than has heretofore been understood, and in which they are not merely associated but mutually constituted. He advances his queer Marxist theoretical approach to investigating how differing intersections of identity affect people's conceptualizations of the state and their relationship to it. His objects of study include D.H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love (1920), Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille (completed 1933, published 2020), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Spanish Civil War love poems (composed 1936, published 2020), and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night (1937).
- The long 20th century
- Literary Modernisms
- Queer theory
- Marxist theory
- Gender and sexuality
- Authoritarianism
- Anti-fascism
- The Harlem Renaissance
