Claudia Sterbini (AHRC Funding)

Thesis title: Case Studies in Nonsexuality: Pathological Asexuality at the Crossing of Sexology and Literature

Biography

Background

Claudia Sterbini is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explores the construction of pathological asexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. She is interested in queer history, the medical humanities and Victorian literature and culture. She has published in the medical humanities blog The Polyphony and has a forthcoming book on fin de siécle sexology. .

Qualifications

  1.    University of Edinburgh (PhD English Literature), 2022-2026. Fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through SGSAH. Thesis: ‘Case Studies in Nonsexuality: at the Crossing of Sexology and Literature’. Supervised by Dr Katherine Inglis and Dr Anna Vaninskaya.
  2.  Illinois State University, Visiting Doctoral Researcher – March-April 2024. Under the supervision of Dr. Ela Przybyło.
  3.  Durham University (MA Romantic and Victorian Literary Studies), 2019-2020. Graduated with Distinction.
  4.  University of Brighton (BA Hons English Literature), 2016-2019. Graduated with first degree, ranking 1/157 in cohort, with two department awards for highest academic achievement.

Undergraduate teaching

  •  Tutor English Literature 2B: English Literature in the World, post-1789 (January-May 2025), Department of Languages Literatures and Cultures, University of Edinburgh. 
  •   Tutor English Literature 2A: English Literature in the World, 1380-1788 (September-December 2024), Department of Languages Literatures and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.2 seminar groups, 12 contact hours each. 23 students. Assessment: 2x2000 words essays. The course focused on literature from Medieval to the 18th Century.  

Postgraduate teaching

  •  Teaching Assistant Documentary Narrative in Health: Make Your Film (January-May 2025), Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. 16 contact hours. 8 students, hybrid tutorials. Supported with teaching activities such as leading hybrid seminars and discussions on Learn.
  •   Teaching Assistant Documentary Narrative in Health: Plan Your Story (September-December 2024), Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. 16 contact hours. 15 students, hybrid tutorials. 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Research summary

My PhD project, funded by AHRC through SGSAH, demonstrates that fin de siècle sexology and literature co-created stigmas of asexuality. Using literary methods to analyse seminal sexological writing, my research evidences linguistic slippages in terminology and moments of rhetoric rupture. I identify how pathetic language has been used by influential sexologists to construct nonsexuality as an abnormality. I demonstrate that discussions of nonsexuality are steeped in moral and ethical language, using writerly and readerly affect to connect this sexual attitude to immorality, and perversion. I undermine assumptions of medical objectivity in the presentation of nonsexual patients, revealing their constructed, narrative nature.

I also argue that literary texts used tropes found in sexology in their presentation of nonsexual characters. I identify how choices to abstain from sex become powerful textual moments through which characters are recognized as degenerate or having detrimental effects on their sexual companions. My research also explores the afterlife of these medico-literary conceptualisations of nonsexuality, revealing their presence in contemporary medicalisation of asexuality.

Current research interests

Medical Humanities; Queer Theory; Victorian and fin de siècle literature; sexology

Past research interests

Typology and its interrelation with topology, maps and sacred place; Deconstruction; Thomas Hardy. MA dissertation: "The Obscure ‘City of Light’: place typology, the signifying Wessex and the missing centre in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure"

Knowledge exchange

Publications

  •    Claudia Sterbini and Ash Jayamohan. Eds. Fin de Sexe?: The Arts and Sciences of Sexology in Europe (1880-1930). Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming. Also contributed the chapter: ‘Sexual Taxonomies, Nonsexuality and Black Hypersexuality in Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex’.
  •    Claudia Sterbini and Ash Jayamohan. ‘How to Look at Sexology (1880-1930): Toward a Meta-Archive of Queer Medical Photography’. Medical Humanities, BMJ. (forthcoming)
  •   ‘Sexology and its Objects’, The Polyphony (2024). Co-authored with Ash Jayamohan. https://thepolyphony.org/2024/09/17/sexology/
  •   ‘We Should Talk About Our Methodological Failures’, The Polyphony (2023) https://thepolyphony.org/2023/11/23/methodological-failures/.
  •   ‘Introduction: Trans as Description and Method - A Reflection in Conversation with Prerana Kumar’s ‘Notes on Ritual as Haunting//Ritual as Healing’’ FORUM 34 (2023).

Positions at Edinburgh

 

  •   James Tait Black Reader in Fiction (2024-2025): reading the shortlisted contemporary literature texts, judging who the winner of the prize is, compile list of opinions on the shortlisted texts.
  •  PhD Medical Humanities Project Assistant (May-July 2023): develop Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network; event organizer. Support students in their medical humanities training. 

Current project grants

Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities Training Partnership

Conference details

  •    “Asexuality and Nonsexuality in  George Moore's 'John Norton'”, British Society for Literature and Science. 10-12 April 2025, University of Lancaster.
  •     ‘Asexuality and the “real demi-vierge”: George Moore’s “John Norton” (1895) as a Sexological Case Study’, Health Wellbeing and the Arts in the Nineteenth-Century, invited speaker with Dr Fraser Riddell. 9-10 January 2025, online.
  •     ‘Taxonomies of sexual coldness’, at ‘Victorian Event’, a flightless conference NAVSA, BAVS, AVSA, VI, DACH-VI. 4-5 September 2024, Stirling.
  •     ‘Queer Taxonomies: The Construction of Nonsexuality in Richard Von Krafft-Ebing’, at Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities. 21 June 2024, Glasgow. 
  •     ‘The Construction of Pathological Male Asexuality in Fin-de-siècle Sexology’, talk for NorthEast Modern Languages Association, 7-10 March 2024, Boston.
  •     ‘The Construction of Pathological Male Asexuality in Fin-de-siècle Sexology’, INCSA Conference, Durham University : The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal, 10-12 July 2024.
  •     ‘“Worse than beasts”: the construction of pathological male asexuality in fin de siècle fiction’, talk for Victorian Popular Fiction Association, 12th-14th July 2023, Lincoln.
  •     ‘“This bleached nocturnal thing”: sexual evolutions and pathologization of asexuality in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine’, British Society for Literature and Science,13th-15th April 2023, Edinburgh.
  •     ‘asexuality and Wells’ Morlocks: diagnosing the frigid patient’, talk for Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia, Online Symposium, 24th-25th January 2023.
  •      ‘A Case Study of St John: Pathological Coldness and (A)sexual Anxiety in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’, talk for the British Society for Literature and Science, 9th April 2022.
  •     ‘Male pathological asexuality in Jane Eyre’, talk for Manchester Metropolitan University, PGR/ECR Long Nineteenth Century, Seminar Series: LGBTQ+ History Month, 24th February 2022.  
  •      ‘On not being like the French: anxiety of an epidemic of asexuality in Wells’, talk for Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia, Online Symposium, 22nd December 2021.  
  •      ‘’Wonderful as it seems in a sexual world’: frigidity and blighted alien genitalia in The War of the Worlds’, talk for the H.G. Wells Society, lecture series: Stranger Worlds: H. G. Wells, Transgression and the Gothic, 13th November 2021.
  •     ‘‘The Thinging Thing’: thingness and unconscious in Heidegger’s ‘Das Ding’ and Dicken’s The Old Curiosity Shop’, talk for PGR/ECR Long Nineteenth Century, Seminar Series: Dickens Special, 16th December 2021.

Invited speaker

  •    Lecture: ‘Incomplete Taxonomies Of (A)Sexual Pathologies: Reading The Co-Production Of Asexuality Across Literature And Sexology’. For the English department. April 2024, Illinois State University. I was an invited speaker and paid a speaker fee. This lecture considered how sexology and modernist novels co-constructed ongoing stigmas of asexuality.
  •     Lecture: ‘Ace 101: Asexual Representation In Media And Literature’. For the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Programme, in association with the Queer Coalition. Public engagement lecture. April 2024, Illinois State University. I was an invited speaker and paid a speaker fee. This lecture introduced students and community members to asexuality as a critical framework.
  •     Workshop Moderator: ‘Peer Review Practice: Approaching Manuscripts’ (June 2024), for SGSAH Summer School. Training on peer-review practices. 1.5 hours, 25 students.

Organiser

  •  Organizer: ‘Fin de Siècle, Fin de Sexe? A Symposium on Sexuality’ – one-day symposium, welcoming innovative interdisciplinary research in the relationship between sexology and literature (Victorian and Modernist). Funded by Edinburgh’s Student Experience Grant. 5th June 2024 – University of Edinburgh.
  •    Organizer: ‘Ethical Exchange workshop’ – provided student training on ethical exchange processes and movements between activist and researcher spaces. Focused on ethics of inclusion/exclusion within research. Provided training to PG, UG and EC researchers. Funded by AHRC through SGSAH. September-November 2023 – online. 
  •     Organizer: ‘Medical Humanities Methodologies Exchange’ – Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network. Supported doctoral students working in the medical humanities with their interdisciplinary methods. 25 July 2023. 3 hours, 30 participants.   
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