Below is a list of my forthcoming public events – it would be lovely to see you at any of them!
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And if you can’t make any of these events, why not book your own? Take a look at the talks or heritage activities I can offer.
October 2026
Friday 16 October, morning: ‘Assigned monster at birth: gendering children and colonial anxiety in and beyond The Tempest‘
Location: Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, London SE1 9DT
Tickets: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/symposium-contested-futures/
A talk for the ‘Contested Futures’ symposium, part of the Shakespeare and Race Festival 2026.
‘Differentiation [between male and female],’ wrote the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1908, ‘ought to be pushed to the very uttermost and everything should be welcomed that makes men more manly and women more womanly; while, on the other hand, all that makes for identity is degenerative’. His words are one of the clearest articulations of the connection between White colonial anxiety and the practice of assigning children a gender from the moment of birth, rather than – as the practice had been for centuries before – understanding children’s genders as malleable and protean, gradually increasing in differentiation as they aged. For Hall and his contemporaries, the failure to sufficiently differentiate between boys and girls risked the downfall of White supremacy: an insufficiently differentiated White race would be both insufficiently civilised and insufficiently fecund.
In this paper, I interrogate the relationship between the gendering of children and the fear of Black and Brown fecundity in one of Shakespeare’s most colonially anxious plays, The Tempest. Prospero must both neutralise the threat posed by Caliban’s potential fertility, and create the conditions for Miranda’s; and a key part of both processes involves his role in assigning the genders of these two characters, both of whom the play positions as his children. But how successfully and coherently are Miranda and Caliban assigned genders, and how does this shift over the course of the play? Drawing on the methodologies of trans studies, which prompt us not to take these children’s assigned genders for granted, I suggest that The Tempest shows us the earliest stages of the imbrication of childhood gender essentialism and White colonial anxiety, which continues to pervade contemporary anti-trans thought.
Friday 16 October, 18.30 for 19.00: Gayberystwyth Books Queer Lit Quarterly
Location: Stiwdio Perfformio / Performance Studio, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth SY23 3DE
Tickets: https://aberystwythartscentre-tickets.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173691042
Queer Lit Quarterly is an evening of book talks and book signing hosted by Gayberystwyth Books with the support of Aberration Cymru. This is an opportunity to meet queer authors and researchers and publishers, who will read from their books, speak about their motivation and the writing process and take questions from the audience, finishing the evening with a panel discussion. You will have the option to meet the authors, purchase their books and have them signed by the authors.
