Dr Wannes Dupont

Lecturer in History of Sexuality

Contact details

Address

Street

Doorway 4, First Floor, Room 1.16
William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place

City
Post code

Availability

  • During the first semester of 2026-2027, my drop-in hours are Tuesdays, 15:00-16:00 and Fridays, 12:00-13:00.

Biography

Background

Trained at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, Connecticut, before becoming Assistant Professor of History at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. When Yale-NUS College was discontinued, I moved briefly to Utrecht University in the Netherlands before accepting my current position at the University of Edinburgh. I have held visiting appointments at Australian National University and at the Free University of Brussels, and I have been a chair of the biannual European Social Sciences History Conference's Sexuality Network since 2016.

External appointments

Research Fellow, University of Antwerp (by courtesy)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Associate Director of GENDER.ED, the UoE's university-wide platform of the promotion of teaching and research on genders and sexualities.

Member of the History Research Committee.

Cohort Leader for Year 3 History undergraduates.

Undergraduate teaching

- Historian's Toolkit

- Introduction to the Modern History of Sexuality

 

Postgraduate teaching

- Demographic Angst & Reproductive Politics

- Historical Methodology

- Developing Historical Research

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Students who wish to pursue a dissertation in the modern history of sexuality are very welcome to contact me. I am particularly interested in projects concerning:

- the history of sexualities in global institutions (including the League of Nations and the United Nations);

- religious histories of sexuality and gender (especially concerning the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian churches)

- histories of the national and global culture wars over contraception, abortion and population control

- the queer history of late 19th- and 20th-century Europe, especially continental Europe

- histories of sexuality, religious and reproductive politics in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore

- all types of histories of the Low Countries

- the history of medicine and psychiatry from a religious, political and biopolitical perspective

- comparative European histories in a broad sense, especially if students want to work with (or include) primary source materials in German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish.

Research summary

Places: 

  • Continental Europe
  • Global perspectives

Themes: 

  • Comparative & Global History
  • Culture
  • Gender
  • Politics
  • Religion

Periods: 

  • Nineteenth Century
  • Twentieth Century & After

Research interests

I'm interested in the European and global histories of sexuality in the 19th and the 20th centuries. These days, I am particularly concerned with global institutions, the policisation of gender and sexuality after World War 2, and the rise of today's culture wars.

Current research activities

I am presently working on a project called The Globalisation of Sex As a Policy Issue, 1945-1965.

Research projects

- Unwilling To Know: Homosexuality At The Crossroads of Europe, 1870-1965

- The Globalisation of Sex As a Policy Issue, 1945-1965

- Sex, Religion and Politics in Singapore, 1945-1971

Current research interests

I am currently working on a monograph about the history of the global culture wars over sex, gender, birth, and population control, with a primary focus on religious actors, especially the Roman Catholic Church. I have published extensively on Catholicism and contraception in the past and, working alongside social scientists, I've been fascinated by the growing controversies around 'gender ideology' and 'woke culture' over the last decade. These seemingly recent issues have deep historical roots, which, I believe, are worth tracing if we wish to understand our present moment better.

Past research interests

In 2026, I published 'Unwilling to Know: Male Homosexuality at the Crossroads of Europe, 1870-1965' with Cambridge University Press. This monograph challenges the long-standing claim that the discourse of homosexuality boomed from the 1870s onwards across Europe and the West. Comparing the queer history of Belgium to that of its more familiar neighbouring Belgium, it demonstrates how homosexuality became a topic of concern at very different times and for highly diverging reasons in various countries. In Belgium, for example, it took until the 1950s before homosexuality was first discovered as a 'problem' requiring attention, and its discussion had been actively and successfully resisted for both legal, political and religious reasons since the late 19th century. As a spin-off of the above-mentioned book project, I have also done research on anti-gay politics and the push for decriminalisation on the international level, especially within the United Nations in the early postwar period. Alongside this research, I have written extensively on the queer history and the wider history of sexuality in the Low Countries.

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