King's College London

Department Member, Department of English

Thesis Title: 'Monks of the dead river': David Wojnarowicz on the New York waterfront

About

My thesis explored the gay cruising that took place in the abandoned piers and warehouses of New York’s derelict Lower West Side waterfront in the late 1970s and early 1980s, looking most closely at the work of writer-artist David Wojnarowicz, a central figure in the city’s East Village arts scene and, later, an outspoken AIDS activist. From a strongly interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on my background in art history, I investigated notions of spatiality, the erotics of place and notions of queer historiography and hauntology, exploring the influence of writers such as Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara and Jean Genet, and artists such as Peter Hujar, Alvin Baltrop, Vito Acconci and Gordon Matta-Clark, on Wojnarowicz’s practice.

I am also interested in late twentieth century visual and literary representations of the nineteenth century poet Arthur Rimbaud, and in responses to the AIDS crisis in the arts.

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