William J. Spurlin

William J. Spurlin is a literary and cultural scholar and Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brunel University London.^[1] He writes on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence in British, American, francophone and German-language texts and is best known for his work in postcolonial queer studies.^[2][1] Wikidata (item Q90730423) describes him as a "queer studies scholar and academic".^[3]

Career

Open Library gives his birth year as 1954.^[4] According to his Brunel profile, Spurlin holds a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Rowan University and an M.A., an Ed.M. (Teachers College), an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, all from Columbia University.^[1] Before retiring in 2022 he was Professor of English at Brunel from 2011 and, from 2017, Vice-Dean for education in the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences. The research for Lost Intimacies was supported by a 2004 sabbatical while he was at Cardiff University.^[2][1] He was named a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2017 and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016.^[1]

Research

According to Brunel, his research covers queer studies, postcolonial studies and critical and cultural theory, and deals with literary and cultural texts from the fin de siècle to the twenty-first century.^[2] Brunel credits his work with helping to formulate queer translation studies as a new discipline, especially through a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on the gender and sexual politics of translation that he guest-edited in 2014.^[2] More recent work looks at queer migration in Francophone writing from the Maghreb, a topic he spoke on at King's College London in March 2025.^[5]

Selected books

• The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities (co-editor with Michael Fischer, Garland, 1995)^[6]
• Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian and Gay Voices from the Midwest (co-editor with Karen Lee Osborne, University of Minnesota Press, 1996)^[7]
• Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English (editor, 2000)^[8]
• Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006). Brunel says the book was funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cape Town.^[2][9]
• Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (Peter Lang; dated 2008 by Open Library and 2009 by Brunel). Brunel says the research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.^{[8][10][2][4]}
• Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities Across Time and Cultures (co-editor, 2010)^[8]
• Écritures du corps (co-editor with Pierre Zoberman and Anne Tomiche, Classiques Garnier, 2013)^[11]
• Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)^[8][2]

He also has a chapter in the Palgrave reader Queer Theory (2004).^[12]

Others with the name

• William Spurlin (recording artist). The scholar is a different person from the independent recording artist William Spurlin, whose releases include Memories from the Vault, Vol. 1 (2020).^[13] See William Spurlin (digital music composer).
• Bill Spurlin (broadcast engineer). A William J. Spurlin was a broadcast engineer in Boston. He presented papers at the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference in 1990 and 1991 while working for The Christian Science Monitor.^[14][15] No source links him to the literary scholar, and they appear to be different people; see Bill Spurlin (broadcast engineer).