Leeds Centre for Global Queer Cultures and Politics

The Centre advances interdisciplinary research in global queer cultures and politics, paying special attention to local histories and intercultural, polycentric, multilingual exchanges, in both contemporary and historical settings. Founded by Vlad Strukov and Helen Finch in 2025, The Centre builds on the expertise and experience of queer researchers in the LCS and across the University and celebrates queer lives of the University’s students and staff.

Engaging queer topics and methodologies, as well as a queer ethics of care, the Centre supports researchers, scholars and educators, including post-graduate (MAR and PhD) researchers. Through equitable, collaborative work, the Centre also seeks to support the visibility of global queer activists, artists, writers, and all those involved in thinking critically and creatively about queer cultures and politics.

The Centre provides a supportive and inclusive research environment for all members, benefitting from the experience of its members in leading the School’s research culture, Equality, DI and Inclusion, and other frameworks that ensure a supporting a safe environment for all. At the same time, the Centre supports the visibility of global and local LGBTQI+ groups, organisations and networks at a time when their existence is under threat.

The Centre aims to:

• Advance research at all levels, raising the profile of LCS and the University as a place for excellent research in this area,
• Contribute to the LCS and University strategic research objectives, 
• Promote the creation and dissemination of high-quality research in queer cultures and politics across disciplinary boundaries, particularly work with a global focus,
• Create a supportive community of researchers in global queer cultures and politics centred around the LCS, but drawing in researchers from across the University and wider networks locally, nationally and internationally,
• Foster innovative teaching in the discipline at all levels,
• Build relationships with queer activists, artists, filmmakers, writers, and other practitioners, particularly those in global contexts

The Centre’s principal activities include:

• A seminar / Work-in-progress series (on site and online),
• Invited lectures and seminars,
• An annual showcase, highlighting the Centre’s work and celebrating achievement,
• Training sessions for researchers interested in Global Queer Cultures and Politics,
• Meetings and workshops with networks, groups and institutions based in Leeds, the UK and internationally

Contact: CGQCP@leeds.ac.uk

Inês Cordeiro Dias is a Lecturer in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies. She teaches in the LCS Modules Queer Films on Global Screens and Global Queer Politics and Cultures. Her research interests include queer beloved communities in Brazilian Cinema and queer Mozambican photography and performance.

Theo Dunshire’s research centres around Holocaust studies and queer history, activism and media. Specifically, they study how those elements converge within queer historical fiction. They are currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Leeds, focussing on twenty-first century queer historical fiction set during the Holocaust and how historical fiction is used to address contemporary queer issues. They undertook their BA in History at Lancaster University and their Masters in Holocaust Studies at Royal Holloway. Their Masters dissertation discussed Martin Sherman's play, Bent, as a response to the gay liberation movement and its reception on the West End during the AIDS epidemic and the era of Section 28.

Eden Hills is a PhD student whose work focusses on feminist and queer studies through a discourse-analytic lens. Her PhD project explores the presence of ‘fascist logics’ within anti-trans, gender-critical contemporary literature and further examines how such logics make their way into public policy, limiting ‘trans possibilities’. Eden’s current work transnational by design, drawing specifically on U.K, U.S, and German contexts, building on her previous publication which analyses the transnational transfer of anti-trans, gender-critical rhetoric from the U.K to Germany. 

Dr Adina Stroia works primarily in the fields of women’s writing, visual culture and film in the contemporary period in the Francophone world. Her upcoming article, ‘‘Le premier qui te touche, je le tue’: on the promise of queer kinship as radical care in Julia Ducournau’s Grave (2016) and Titane (2021)’ is forthcoming with Modern and Contemporary France. Her academic work is complemented by public-facing engagement with contemporary Francophone literature and culture including lesbian writers Fatima Daas and Constance Debré. As Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, she teaches primarily in the French and Film Studies sections at the University of Leeds.

Peter Haysom-Rodríguez is a Lecturer in Modern Languages at Leeds, with a focus on the Portuguese-speaking world. His theoretical expertise lies in Queer ecologies and the Queer Medical Humanities. His current research on Brazil and Portugal involves representations of cancer in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and in Portuguese prose and poetry. His work has been published in such journals as Modern Languages Open, Portuguese Studies, Portuguese Cultural Studies and the Journal of Lusophone Studies. His first monograph, Regionalisms and Resistance in the Twentieth-Century Portuguese Novel: Spatialized Ideologies was published by Legenda in 2024. He is currently preparing his second book, Aesthetics of Malignancy: Portraits of Cancer in Contemporary Portuguese Literature, which is under contract with Liverpool University Press.