
Dr Sarah Wingrove
About
Biography
Sarah Wingrove is an interdisciplinary scholar, working across literary studies, sociology and histories of sexuality and gender, and specialising in Anne Lister studies. She recently earned her PhD from the School of Literature and Languages after successfully defending her thesis, Treading Carefully: Queer Pilgrimage and Travel Motivations of Anne Lister and Twenty-First Century 'Lister Sisters'.
She has previously studied in the Film Studies departments at the University of Surrey and King's College London.
Sarah has contributed her research to the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, and the Women’s History Network. She additionally supports the endeavours of the Anne Lister Research Summit, the Anne Lister Society and Packed With Potential.
She has provided research-led teaching to undergraduate and postgraduate students of English Literature and Sociology, and has presented her research at national and international conferences including the British Sociological Association, the Anne Lister Society, and Lesbian Lives. She is skilled in conducting archival research, autoethnographic analysis, and conducting and coding semi-structured interviews. Sarah has additionally facilitated work on the projects, Mapping Medieval Women Writers and Navigating Masculinity among Heterosexual Men Who Dance with Men alongside her own projects.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
(PTY at Warner Brothers Production TV UK.)
Affiliations and memberships
News
In the media
ResearchResearch interests
Anne Lister and her peers
Literary figure fandom communities and behaviours
Queer pilgrimage practices
Nineteenth-century mobilities and gender
Conference Papers
British Sociological Association (23rd April 2025), University of Manchester
“Negotiating Heteromasculinity: Straight Men Who Dance with Men (MDM) in UK Swing
Anne Lister Society Meeting (4th April 2025), Northwestern University
“‘left Ann in the ladies room’: Negotiating the Public Sphere and Anne Lister’s (and Ann Walker’s) Train Travel”.
Also presented at the Railways in Literature seminar for the Institute of Historical Research (29th May 2025).
Anne Lister Research Summit (1st February 2025), Packed with Potential
“Reading for Pleasure: Sexuality, Morality, and the Erotic Literature of Anne Lister” with Professor Deborah Kamen and Jann Kraus. Available at: https://youtu.be/hCns1AiYzfM?si=byp3dz8GIrICACOJ
Anne Lister Society Meeting (6th April 2024), Northwestern University
“Infectious Itineraries: The Impact of the Cholera and Covid-19 Pandemics on Anne Lister and Lister Enthusiasts’ Travel Behaviours in Britain”.
Queer and Trans Philologies (22nd March 2024), University of Cambridge
‘“a neat place w[hi]ch you pass thro’: the evolving orthography of Anne Lister’s early travel writing”.
Truth on the Line (17th May 2022), University of Surrey
“Cracking the Spine: Querying Ethical Engagement with Anne Lister’s Archive”.
Anne Lister Society Meeting (8th April 2022), Northwestern University
“Queer Pilgrimage: Anne Lister and Identity Tourism”. Also presented at Lesbian Lives (23rd March 2024).
Lesbian Lives (4th March 2022), University College Cork
“The Effects of ‘Anne-dom’: The Collaborative Production and Dissemination of New Information on Anne Lister”.
120BPM Symposium (11th May 2019), King’s College London.
“Screwing up the Sheets: Sex on the Death Bed in 120 BPM”.
Future Sex (28th June 2018), University of Surrey.
“Representing Queer Spaces on Screen and the Future of London’s LGBT+ Venues”.
Research interests
Anne Lister and her peers
Literary figure fandom communities and behaviours
Queer pilgrimage practices
Nineteenth-century mobilities and gender
Conference Papers
British Sociological Association (23rd April 2025), University of Manchester
“Negotiating Heteromasculinity: Straight Men Who Dance with Men (MDM) in UK Swing
Anne Lister Society Meeting (4th April 2025), Northwestern University
“‘left Ann in the ladies room’: Negotiating the Public Sphere and Anne Lister’s (and Ann Walker’s) Train Travel”.
Also presented at the Railways in Literature seminar for the Institute of Historical Research (29th May 2025).
Anne Lister Research Summit (1st February 2025), Packed with Potential
“Reading for Pleasure: Sexuality, Morality, and the Erotic Literature of Anne Lister” with Professor Deborah Kamen and Jann Kraus. Available at: https://youtu.be/hCns1AiYzfM?si=byp3dz8GIrICACOJ
Anne Lister Society Meeting (6th April 2024), Northwestern University
“Infectious Itineraries: The Impact of the Cholera and Covid-19 Pandemics on Anne Lister and Lister Enthusiasts’ Travel Behaviours in Britain”.
Queer and Trans Philologies (22nd March 2024), University of Cambridge
‘“a neat place w[hi]ch you pass thro’: the evolving orthography of Anne Lister’s early travel writing”.
Truth on the Line (17th May 2022), University of Surrey
“Cracking the Spine: Querying Ethical Engagement with Anne Lister’s Archive”.
Anne Lister Society Meeting (8th April 2022), Northwestern University
“Queer Pilgrimage: Anne Lister and Identity Tourism”. Also presented at Lesbian Lives (23rd March 2024).
Lesbian Lives (4th March 2022), University College Cork
“The Effects of ‘Anne-dom’: The Collaborative Production and Dissemination of New Information on Anne Lister”.
120BPM Symposium (11th May 2019), King’s College London.
“Screwing up the Sheets: Sex on the Death Bed in 120 BPM”.
Future Sex (28th June 2018), University of Surrey.
“Representing Queer Spaces on Screen and the Future of London’s LGBT+ Venues”.
Teaching
Current teaching:
Seminar leading for Contemporary Issues in Sociology (SOC0001).
Previous teaching:
Guest lecturer for Histories of Sex/uality (SOCM071).
Seminar leading for Theories of Reading II (ELI1011).
Seminar leading for The Gothic Imagination: 1800s to The Present (ELI3065).
Publications
Forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Anne Lister (Roulston and Gonda, eds).
Published in the journal, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
Written for the Women's History Network.
Queer pilgrimage is a journey made by an individual or a group to a location, permanent or transitory, which bears relevance to the lives, cultures, and politics of queer people. It is undertaken for the pilgrim/s to feel an affinity with the space itself through emotional and/or physical proximity. Since Gentleman Jack first aired in 2019, acts of queer pilgrimage have increased substantially to key sites associated with Lister, including to Shibden Hall (her ancestral home), Halifax, York, and beyond. In this article I draw upon two forms of queer pilgrimage in relation to Anne Lister. The first is this substantial increase in tourism and attraction to sites associated with Lister. The second is the queer pilgrimage Lister herself undertook in 1822 to the Ladies of Llangollen at their home, Plas Newydd.In drawing out these two comparatively, I propose that historical and contemporary forms of queer pilgrimage have more in common than may initially be apparent, namely a commonality between the queer pilgrims of the 19th and 21st centuries around a desire for community.
ABSTRACT
Recent French films have sparked discussion about how we under-stand the AIDS crisis and how that historical understanding informs present-day views of HIV/AIDS in France and further afield. An example of this, Robin Campillo’s period piece, 120 Battements par minute (2017), explicitly depicts ‘la petite mort’ and the connection between orgasm and demise through the experiences of Parisian ACT UP members during the height of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s. The following article argues that the three sex scenes in 120 BPM are pivotal points in the narrative which quite literally raise the dead, connecting the characters to lost lovers, members of their community and their past selves. Through this, I analyse how these scenes interact with the film’s re-enactment scenes of protest actions in the 1990s, through their choreography, dialogue, duration, and the images of sexual acts themselves. To do this, I identify how the film troubles and recon-structs ideas of death in AIDS cinema through the recognition of the HIV+ individual as one who will not be desexualised by the virus, even if they are dying. This article will scrutinise and query the relationship between the sex scene, mortality, and memory in 120 BPM.
RÉSUMÉ
Récemment, le cinéma français a suscité des débats autour de notre compréhension de la crise du SIDA, en particulier comment cette vision historique éclaire notre point de vue actuel sur le VIH et le SIDA en France mais aussi à l’étranger. Un exemple de cette production cinématique est le film d’époque de Robin Campillo, 120 Battements par minute (2017), qui représente ‘la petite mort’ et la connexion entre l’orgasme et la mort, en regardant les expériences des mem-bres parisiens du groupe « ACT UP » au sommet de la crise du SIDA au début des années 1990. L’article qui suit affirme que les trois scènes de sexe dans 120 BPM sont des points clés dans l’histoire qui ressus-citent littéralement les morts, en liant les personnages aux amours perdus, aux membres de leur communauté, et aux anciennes ver-sions d’eux-mêmes. En avançant cette thèse, j’analyse les interactions de ces scènes-ci et leur chorégraphie, dialogue, durée, ainsi que leur représentation des actes, avec les scènes de manifestation qui ten-tent de recréer certaines manifestations des années 1990. J’analyse la manière dont le film dérange et reconstruit les idées de mort dans le cinéma de la crise du SIDA par la reconnaissance de l’individu séropositif en tant que quelqu’un qui ne sera pas désexualisé par le virus, malgré le fait qu’il est mourant. Cet article examinera et inter-rogera les liens entre le scène de sexe, la mortalité, et le souvenir dans 120 BPM.