Samuel Houlberg

Queer Internationalism: Race, Empire and International LGBTQ+ Activism, 1978-2010

Principal supervisor: Professor Jonathan Bell, UCL Institute of the Americas.
Subsidiary supervisor: Professor Phillip Ayoub, UCL Department of Political Science.
 

My research explores the history of international LGBTQ+ human rights organisations, focusing particularly on their thinking about race, empire, and cultural difference in the work. After the initial successes of the sexual revolutions, activists founded organisations like the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC, now Outright) in order to bring greater international pressure to bear against national discriminatory conditions. However, such groups regularly receive criticism from both the left and the right for being tools of imperialism, and imposing Western understandings of sexuality and gender on the rest of the world. My research centres the work of activists themselves to explore the validity of such criticisms in historical context, and to consider activists responded to these criticisms, engaging with diverse communities with subtlety and attention to cultural variation. 

PhD funding

• Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) studentship

Education

• 2023: MPhil in American History, University of Cambridge
• 2022: BA (Hons) in French and History (with year abroad), King's College London

Conference papers and presentations

• "Spirit Photography and a Spiritual Understanding of Modernity in the United States and Europe, 1869-1925", Occultism and Popular Culture in Modern Europe conference, University of Copenhagen, 2023.
• "The 'Most Ingenious of Modern Sensations': War, Technology and the Emergence of Spirit Photography", Spooky History Conference, 2023.