Publications
The Construction of Race in Les Misérables Fanworks: Liberty, Equality, Diversity
By analyzing contemporary Les Misérables online fandom, how can we conceptualize fandom racism, especially when it complicates the typical and sometimes reductive narratives that assign racism to only the “bad” and the conservative “other”?
Click here to see more on the Bloomsbury website.
Talks, Panels and Papers
Publishing, Podcasting & Promotion – BARRICADES: A Les Mis Convention. 14 July 2024.
From Chorus Line to Spotlight – Performances of ESEA themed musicals and panel discussion – Moongate Mix 10 presented by MOONGATE in conjunction with CITY UNIVERSITY, ESEA ONLINE HUB & URDANG.
Navigating the creative industries and media sector as an LGBTQ+ person – The School of Communication & Creativity (City University of London) 11 December 2023.
Writing Audio Drama – Audio Drama Hub Podfest. 11 November 2023.
The Canonical Racialised Language of Les Misérables – BARRICADES: A Les Mis Convention. 16 April 2023.
‘Never been a father, lover, husband, friend’: Asexuality as Positivity in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – Untold Tales: Sharing Peripheral LGBTQ Stories from Research(University of Surrey) 22 July 2022.
Breaking binaries: Life of a queer artist-scientist – Great Exhibition Road Festival at the V&A Museum. 19 June 2022
Positionality and racial formation while interviewing Trans People Of Colour (TPOC) during Covid 19 – 2022 PGR Humanities Colloquium at Royal Holloway, University of London. 1 June 2022
The Construction of Race in Les Misérables Fanworks [Plenary Session] – BARRICADES: A Les Mis Convention. 24 April 2022
Purposefully appropriating white cisgender characters in Les Misérables – Global Gender Nonconformity, Past and Present: Language, Labels and Ways of Knowing – Supported by: Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King’s College London; Institute of Humanities, Northumbria University. 10 June 2021
‘Decidedly, I am beautiful!’, exploring the use of identity euphoria in literary criticism – Arts and Decolonisation Symposium – Royal Holloway, University of London. 19 March 2021 [Winner: Best Paper]
The above paper was recorded and re-released in its entirety for the below episode: Trans Day of Visibility.
PhD Thesis
Royal Holloway (University of London) | 2019-2023
‘colliers, negroes, demons, or whichever you fear most’: Exploring legacies of non-white race and non-cis gender in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, its adaptations and in fanworks
ABSTRACT:
In this thesis I investigate the treatment of non-white race and non-cis gender within Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables, its adaptations and in fanworks. I begin by establishing the racial and gendered canon of Les Misérables, especially the misappropriation of the vocabulary of enslavement, the Goodness of white female beauty and the criminality assigned to Black and Indigenous peoples. I then turn to three adaptations made in the winter of 2018/9: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, the BBC production written by Andrew Davies and Fuji TV’s レ・ミゼラブル 終わりなき旅路 [Les Misérables a Never Ending Journey] to explore how three writers from different cultural backgrounds make Les Misérables ‘relevant’ to their audiences. This includes the restitution of power towards Black humanity, the perpetuation of racial stereotypes hidden behind ‘colour blind’ casting, and fanfiction-like divergences used to create political meta-textual messages. In the third part I use interviews with fans of colour and data collected from the social media sites tumblr and ArchiveofOurOwn to track how Hugo’s language of race and racism remains embedded in Les Misérables fanworks even while its fans work to become a liberal, anti-racist fandom. I conclude with a critical re-reading of Hugo’s novel that ‘unsilences’ race and gender identity in Les Misérables to argue that the novel is full of queer, racial possibilities that are both plentiful and overdue.