Queer Histories, Legacies and Imaginings

Join us for a special event with writer Diana Souhami, artist Sadie Lee and art historian and writer Rebecca Birrell that considers the histories, legacies and imaginings of queer culture.

For this event, the speakers will be discussing researching and representing LGBTQ+ culture and women’s creative work.

The evening will include an audience Q&A and the chance for discussion. We warmly welcome students and the general public alike to be part of the event.

About the speakers

Diana Souhami is the author of Gluck: Her Biography, Gertrude and Alice, Greta and Cecil, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and winner of the US Lambda Literary Award), Natalie and Romaine (originally published as Wild Girls), the bestselling Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter (also winer of the Lambda Literary Award and a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’), Selkirk’s Island (winner of the Whitbread Biography Award), Coconut Chaos, Edith Cavell (winner of the EDP Jarrold East Anglian Book of the Year Award), Murder at Wrotham Hill (shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction), and the novel Gwendolen. Her most recent book is No Modernism Without Lesbians. She is a Rainbow List National Treasure and she lives in Cornwall.

Sadie Lee is an award-winning British figurative painter. Her challenging paintings focus on a range of subjects, including the representation of women in art, sexuality, gender and the aging body. She has been selected to show work in many group shows including exhibitions at The I.C.A. and Museum of London. Solo shows include exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery (London), Manchester City Art Gallery, Schwules Museum (Berlin) and Museum of Modern Art (Slovenia).

Rebecca Birrell is a Research Affiliate at The Fitzwilliam Museum, where she was Curator of 19th and 20th Century Paintings and Drawings between 2021-2023. She curated the rehang of Galleries 1-5 that opened in March 2024. She is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at University of St Andrews. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. It was awarded an Antonia Frazer Award for a Biography in Progress by the Society of Authors in 2019. A Guardian/Observer Art Book of the Year 2021, it was described as ‘a striking act of collective empathy.’ It was also longlisted for the William M B Berger Prize for British Art History 2022 and shortlisted for the PEN Hessell Titlman Prize, 2022.

Accessibility

This event will take place in the VSR, a large, flat room on the ground level that you enter from the Main Walkway in Murray Edwards College. There are no stairs to enter or once you are in the room. There is plenty of room for wheelchairs wherever the user would like to sit, we can flexibly move chairs around and will do our best to accommodate any specific requests.

Please get in touch if you have any further queries or requirements: womensart@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk or call the Porter's Lodge at +44 (0)1223 762100.

Please note this is a rescheduled event from 5 June 2025.