George Severs

Background

About George Severs

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project 'Race and Sexual and Reproductive Health Charities in postwar Britain'(PI Dr Caroline Rusterholz). Before joining the Graduate Institute, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (SHaME) project at Birkbeck, University of London. There, I researched the history of male survivors of sexual violence in the UK, as well as the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on forensic and genitourinary medics working with survivors of sexual violence. My first book, based on my PhD thesis and under contract with Bloomsbury Academic, is a history of HIV/AIDS activism in England during the 1980s and 1990s. I hold a First Class Honours degree from Royal Holloway, University of London, and an MPhil in Modern British History from Pembroke College, Cambridge. My MPhil thesis explored the Church of England's response(s) to the AIDS epidemic. I did my PhD at Selwyn College, Cambridge which was awarded in 2021. A previous project looking at the British National Party's opposition to gay men c. was published originally in Gender and Education. I am Secretary of the Oral History Society's LGBTQ special interest group and Public History Editor of the Oral History journal. I was curator of the 'personal testimony and memory' theme of the 2018 London AIDS Cultures and Histories Festival, and I co-convened of the Cambridge Gender and Sexuality History Workshop.