About

I’m passionate about LGBTQ+ history, especially as it relates to science and medicine. I’ve been integral in originating queer perspectives on the history of evolutionary biology and my reappraisal of the sexological ideas of Charles Darwin has been especially influential.

Being a historian is my third career. Through my late teens, 20s, and early 30s, I worked as an underrated actor in TV and the West End. In my mid-30s, I necessarily became a full-time carer (studying being the perfect complement to caring responsibilities). I completed my BA (2006-2010), MA (2016-2017), and PhD (2017-2021) at Oxford Brookes University, developing a passion for both history of science and LGBTQ+ history. Combining them has been an incredible adventure which has taken me around the world in more ways than one. My Master’s dissertation was named as proxime accessit (runner-up) for the Royal Historical Society’s 2017 Rees Davies Prize. My PhD was funded by the Wellcome Trust. I’ve published articles in leading academic journals (listed here) published by Cambridge University Press, the Linnean Society (of which I’m a Fellow), Oxford University Press, and the Royal Society. I’m a recipient of the Stearn Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Natural History, and my article ‘Bounds of Diversity: Queer Zoology in Europe from Aristotle to John Hunter,’ published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society in 2022, was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize in 2023. My first book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life: A History of Sex and Science, will be published by Yale University Press in August 2026.

I appear in the pioneering documentary Queer Planet, which premiered in the UK on Sky Nature in November 2023 and on Peacock in the US in June 2024.

Between 2006 and 2016, I maintained a public history project that explored Oxford’s rich LGBTQ+ history, Queer Oxford. I hope to return to this in the future to work on a book-length version. In the meantime, much of the material can be found on another website, queeroxford.info.

In 2021, after 15 years living in Oxford, I moved to England’s South Coast (close to Brighton) where I now work as an associate lecturer and freelance writer. I’m currently writing my second book. I regularly speak about queer history at events across the UK. I make the most of seaside living, especially long clifftop walks. I go to a lot of concerts, mainly classical these days although I love to see my favourite band, Stornoway. Follow me on Bluesky @rossb-brighton.bsky.social.