My research focuses on the production of sexual knowledge in early-twentieth-century Germany. I am particularly interested in the ways in which new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality were produced as a collaborative endeavour between the arts - literature, film and visual culture more broadly - and medical and natural sciences. In doing so, my research broadly covers the interdisciplinary areas of queer German Studies, the history of sexuality, environmental humanities and medical humanities.

I have pursued these research interest across various projects. I investigate the importance of queer and trans life writing for the production of sexual knowledge in my Open Access monograph Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing (Michigan University Press, 2023).

More recently, I have been interested in the ways in which German-language artists, scientists and writers (1860s-1930s) mobilised knowledge about non-human animals and their natural environment to create new ideas about sex, gender and sexuality. In 2024, I was awarded an AHRC Catalyst award to pursue this project. Existing publications in this area include my co-edited special issue on "Sex and Nature" for Environmental Humanities (2022), and a peer-reviewed article on the importance of intersex butterfly experiments for German sexologists in the 1920s (History of Human Sciences, 2020).

At Exeter, I am a co-director of the Sexual Knowledge Unit and affiliate member of the Centre for Medical History and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. In 2018 I co-founded Exeter's Animals and Environment Reading Group, which I currently co-organise with Professor Paul Young (English and Creative Writing) and Dr Benedict Morrison (English and Creative Writing).

I joined the University of Exeter in 2017 as Postdoctoral Researcher on the Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology project (2017-2020), after completing my PhD in German at the University of Cambridge (King's College) in 2016. In 2020 I was appointed Lecturer in German. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in German in 2022.

Profile photo credit: Diana Patient