Graduate Student Bios

Colin O'Connell is a Ph.D. candidate trained in Women's and Gender History and Modern European History. His dissertation "Queer, Celtic, Rural“ is a history of homosexuality that centers queer men in rural Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1970s and '80s. Analyzing sociological records on suicide and suicide prevention, Colin locates these men along and against a civilizing, Durkheimian discourse on anomic isolation widely advanced by cities' gay liberationists. He blends affect theory and oral history to recover these historiographically overlooked men from such discourse, ultimately offering a social history of their everyday lives and same-sex practices in the Celtic fringe. Colin's research sits at the intersection of rural queer studies, British cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. He received a B.A. in History from Loyola University Chicago.