Woke studies at uni have hit a new low – and your taxes are paying for it
Humanities research is hardly awash with money. I had to put enormous and sustained effort into securing full funding for my PhD at Sussex in gender history – and, since it was about straight Britons’ quest for intimacy in the decades after the Swinging Sixties, it was actually something with widespread relevance.
Perhaps I simply didn’t offer something ludicrously woke enough. I continue to keep an eye on academic projects and wonder at the projects funded to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
A historian friend who studies 17th-century English and German travellers to Syria sent me this one, which is currently advertising for research positions lasting three years at full pay (£33,000 per year): “The Europe That Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000.”
The ad boasts that the project “examines, for the first time, the ways in which post-war gay erotica and porn magazines helped forge a pan-European gay male constituency build [sic] on processes of identification, solidarity and subcultural distinction that we proposed to call ‘homoeuropeanism’, a specifically homosexual and sexualised form of European identification that developed in the context of postwar geopolitics”. Applicants will “write a research monograph on … Cold War politics and aesthetics as mediated by postwar European gay porn magazines”.
With the Government’s emphasis on science, humanities funding has hardly ballooned since my PhD days, and well-established former historian colleagues of mine have been offered voluntary redundancies in once-vigorous departments. That there is still money for three years of fully paid-up research on “subcultural homosexual enunciations” is as funny as it is depressing.
