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Thomas’s research interests lie at the intersection of cultural, religious, and queer(ing) history in the early modern period. For their PhD project, they are applying an interdisciplinary approach to historical research, proposing to undertake a critical reading of eighteenth-century devotional material, by working from queer, gender, feminist, and literary theory, as well as psychoanalytic theory. Thomas is interested in how bodies are constructed and culturally inscribed in this discourse, arguing that these seemingly normative gendered and sexed subjects (including Christ) can, in fact, be read as queer. In doing so, they hope to problematise histories of the body that present a universal (and heteronormative) model of its cultural inscription, endeavouring to refigure this field of study by pointing to other possible narratives of embodiment. Indeed, they argue that these textual subjects seem to fail to conform to dominant models of sexual difference and gender, questioning their supposed naturalness, so causing them to lapse and lose their sure footing.
PhD
Supervisor: Jason Peacey
Working title: 'Religious Bodies: Refiguring Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Early/Modern'
Conference Papers and Presentations
'Refiguring “the maternal”: the body of Christ and regimes of sexual difference in the eighteenth-century west', Women's History Network, April 2023
Teaching
PGTA for Theoretical Issues in History and Literature (CMII0026)