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Public Lecture: Santanu Das, ‘The Maritime Closet: Queer Lives Before the Mast’
Date: 21 October 2025
Time: 1730-1900
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College
‘Naval tradition?’, Winston Churchill was said to have growled, ‘Monstrous! Nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’. In this lecture, Santanu Das will seek to uncover and examine this much-mythologised yet largely unknown world aboard what Herman Melville called ‘the wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep’ and its relationship to literary and cultural forms.
Drawing on a variety of sources from British and US maritime archives—from descriptions of sailors’ tattoos (ranging from drawings of ‘penises with sails’ to words like ‘Pay before you enter’ on strategic body-parts) and ethnological texts to nineteenth-century sodomy trials and sailors’ testimonies—Das focuses on particular moments and processes of erotic knowledge and action in selected texts by Herman Meville, Pierre Loti, E.M. Forster and James Hanley.
The impulses are both historicist and literary. What such an investigation reveals is a lost world of linguistic richness and tactile intimacies queerer than queer, resulting in powerful and often perverse structures of feeling and form, but seldom organised under the sign of ‘queerness’. The literary texts Das considers, on the other hand, do not just fill in the gaps in the archives or imagine a radical future. Shaped by ‘fate and ban’ as much as the lives they imagine, they represent the phenomenology of desire and its entanglement in the worlds of violence, authority and law through strategies which resist straightforward historicist or politicised readings.
Important to the lecture will be the question of the archive and its relationship to life-writing:
How do we create and define a ‘queer archive’, if at all, given the silences of traditional sources and the strangeness of literary texts?
Is there a specifically ‘maritime closet’?
If much of the attention in recent years has been on the discursive and the political, Das seeks to highlight the perverse impulses and pleasures of queer lives and literature in an increasingly sanitised critical culture.
Speaker Details:
Santanu Das is Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of two award-winning monographs, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (2018) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2008) and the Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (2014). He is currently editing the Oxford Book of Colonial Writings of the First World War and writing a book on the experience and aesthetics of sea voyages.
Further Details and Contacts:
After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception.
This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended.
This is an in-person event, but it will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 14:30 on 21 October 2025.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Date: 21 October 2025
Time: 1730-1900
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College
‘Naval tradition?’, Winston Churchill was said to have growled, ‘Monstrous! Nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’. In this lecture, Santanu Das will seek to uncover and examine this much-mythologised yet largely unknown world aboard what Herman Melville called ‘the wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep’ and its relationship to literary and cultural forms.
Drawing on a variety of sources from British and US maritime archives—from descriptions of sailors’ tattoos (ranging from drawings of ‘penises with sails’ to words like ‘Pay before you enter’ on strategic body-parts) and ethnological texts to nineteenth-century sodomy trials and sailors’ testimonies—Das focuses on particular moments and processes of erotic knowledge and action in selected texts by Herman Meville, Pierre Loti, E.M. Forster and James Hanley.
The impulses are both historicist and literary. What such an investigation reveals is a lost world of linguistic richness and tactile intimacies queerer than queer, resulting in powerful and often perverse structures of feeling and form, but seldom organised under the sign of ‘queerness’. The literary texts Das considers, on the other hand, do not just fill in the gaps in the archives or imagine a radical future. Shaped by ‘fate and ban’ as much as the lives they imagine, they represent the phenomenology of desire and its entanglement in the worlds of violence, authority and law through strategies which resist straightforward historicist or politicised readings.
Important to the lecture will be the question of the archive and its relationship to life-writing:
How do we create and define a ‘queer archive’, if at all, given the silences of traditional sources and the strangeness of literary texts?
Is there a specifically ‘maritime closet’?
If much of the attention in recent years has been on the discursive and the political, Das seeks to highlight the perverse impulses and pleasures of queer lives and literature in an increasingly sanitised critical culture.
Speaker Details:
Santanu Das is Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at All Souls College, University of Oxford. He is the author of two award-winning monographs, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (2018) and the editor of Race, Empire and First World War Writing (2008) and the Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (2014). He is currently editing the Oxford Book of Colonial Writings of the First World War and writing a book on the experience and aesthetics of sea voyages.
Further Details and Contacts:
After the event, join us for a complimentary wine reception.
This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended.
This is an in-person event, but it will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 14:30 on 21 October 2025.
Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.