HASS Inaugural Lecture - Professor Jana Funke

The faculty are warmly welcomed to attend Professor Jana Funke’ Inaugural Lecture, taking place on Wednesday, 11 March 2026 in Streatham Campus, University of Exeter.

Our standard running order for the event is as follows:

• 15:45 doors open - 15mins
• 16:00 welcome/intro (DPVC) - 5 mins
• 16:05 Lecture – 50-55mins
• 16:55 closing (Head of Department) - 5mins
• 17:00 drinks reception
• 18:00 finish

The early twentieth century is widely recognised as a historical moment in which understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality shifted for a variety of reasons, including political activism, scientific knowledge production, and aesthetic innovation. This lecture will examine the importance of friendship and collaboration in this context. I will turn to three of my favourite sites of modernist creativity and queer feminist affiliation – Villa Kenwin at the shores of Lake Geneva, Smallhythe Place in rural Kent, and the transnational journal Urania – to consider how early twentieth-century artists supported each other in developing new ways of writing, thinking, and being in relation to one another. I will also reflect on the importance of queer feminist collaboration and friendship in my own work and life so far.

Bio:

Jana Funke is Professor of Modern Literature and Sexuality Studies at the University of Exeter. Her publications include Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011, co-edited with Ben Davies), The World and Other Unpublished Works by Radclyffe Hall (2016), Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts (2018, co-edited with Jen Grove), Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Texts, Genres (2023, co-edited with Elizabeth English and Sarah Parker), and the first critical edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (2024, co-edited with Hannah Roche). She has co-directed several collaborative research projects, including Rethinking Sexology (2015-2022), Out and About: Queering the Museum (2020-2022), and 100 Year of The Well of Loneliness (2025-2029).

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