Tom Houlton

Profile

Biography

Tom Houlton is a Lecturer in Film and Literature, joining the department in 2021 as an Associate Lecturer, before taking up the Lecturer role in 2022. He specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary queer literature, film, culture and theory, with particular interests in the AIDS crisis, Hollywood culture, and World Cinema. He is currently editing a collection on Queer Memorialisation in the 21^st Century.

Tom completed an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2005, and an MA in Museum Studies at New York University in 2008. His AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Sussex (completed 2016) examined the role of monuments and memorials alongside psychoanalytic object relations, postcolonial theory, and queer ecology.

From 2012-2017 he was an Associate Lecturer at the University of Sussex, where he taught on the MA in Sexual Dissidence, and co-led the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, including running the Sex Diss Film Club’s screening programme. He was also chief editor and submissions editor of the peer-review interdisciplinary postgraduate journal Excursions.

Tom is a creative writer and editor, and has had fiction and poetry published in Entropy Magazine, Burning House Press, Oxford Literary Review, and others. Alongside academia Tom has worked at museums, galleries and other arts institutions in the United States and the UK, as well as in the construction industry. His monograph, Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects, was published by Routledge in 2022. He is a member of York’s interdisciplinary Centre for Modern Studies.

Research

Overview

Tom works across a number of interdisciplinary research areas. His main focus of research has been on the monument, particularly as a colonial and postcolonial politico-cultural form, and its relation between cultures in the Global North and Global South, particularly through colonialist interventions. He is also interested in the psychogeographical qualities of monuments as magical, psychic objects that fulfil a function of mourning that is intimately linked with their political power, and their relationship to questions of representations of race, gender, and sexuality. 

His monograph, Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects (2022) discusses: the Holocaust and psychoanalytic trauma/object relations; monuments to Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes (and the Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements); politics of LBGTQ+ memorialisation alongside ecological art, sustainability and modes of queer resistance.

Tom also works on queer film, literature and culture of the modern contemporary period, in particular works responding to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s. He is interested in the intersections between queer theory, representations of sexuality and nonhuman worlds more broadly, including in postcolonial and indigenous filmmaking and literature, as well as Golden Age Hollywood. He has recently published articles on Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 ‘Ozploitation’ movie Wake in Fright, and a creative response to Lebanese artist Ali Cherri’s work in his ‘How I Am Monument’ exhibition catalogue, for the Vienna Secession Gallerie (Dec 2024-Feb 2025) and Baltic Gateshead (Apr 2025-Oct 2025).

Tom is currently editing a collection of essays on 2SLGBTQIA+ Monuments and Remembrance in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2027), alongside an upcoming article for the Journal of Architecture, creative work in the Oxford Literary Review, and a review of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s latest poetry collection The Idea of an Entire Life (2025) in Transmotion journal.

Supervision

Tom would be happy to supervise PhDs on the following topics:

• Questions of memorialisation and remembrance in literature, film, visual culture, public institutions, and so on.
• Representations of AIDS across film, literature and culture.
• Queer theory, film, literature and culture in the 20th and 21st Centuries, whether through an interdisciplinary approach or single-author study.
• Psychoanalysis, its history and influences, including intersections with theories of gender/sexuality, the postcolonial/necropolitical, as well as ecology and object relationality.
• Hollywood cinema (particularly Golden Age), and in particular its intersections with genre and representations of sexuality, gender, race, and so on.
• Creative-critical work, if research interests align.
• If there’s anything else you think he might be a good fit for, please drop him a line!

Teaching

Undergraduate

Tom currently convenes the first year module Reading Now, an introduction to literary theory and criticism; and the second year World Literature Module Queer World Cinema, which examines contemporary LGBTQ+ films from across the world. He also convenes the third year Advanced Option Module AIDS in the `80s and `90s, one of the only undergraduate modules in the UK to examine the AIDS crisis. 

He also contributes teaching to a range of other modules across the department, including A World of Literature I: Classics and Cultural Translations, A World of Literature II: Empires and Aftermaths, The Age of Extremes: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature, and American Literature: From First World War to the End of Empire.

Postgraduate

Tom convenes and teaches on York’s MA Film and Literature, as well as teaching on the MA Literature in the Creative and Cultural Industries. He convenes the MA special option module Back to Babylon, which explores Golden Age Hollywood cinema (1930-1950) alongside key texts and concepts from queer theory.

External activities

Overview

From 2022-2023 Tom was Project Evaluation Officer on the StreetLife Project, based on York’s Coney Street. This community project, funded by the UK Government Community Renewal fund, was a partnership between the University of York, City of York Council, York Civic Trust, and creative practitioners. It provided free workshops, talks, classes and exhibitions exploring public realm, adaptive reuse, sustainability, diversity, equality and access. Tom was part of the team managing the outcomes and outputs of the project, including future collaborations and funding impact.