Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston is a trans-femme academic, journalist, and gender consultant from the north of Ireland, specializing in the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, the history of censorship, neurodivergence, gender diversity, and trans inclusion.
Lloyd Meadhbh presently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in English at the University of Cambridge, where they also hold the position of Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College. They are working on a project exploring the medicalization and politicization of sex in early twentieth-century British, US, Canadian, and Caribbean culture. This research was previously supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institute of Health Research, through a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta.
Their first monograph, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (OUP, 2023), explores the ways in the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Supported by the inaugural Hertford College – Faculty of English DPhil Scholarship in Irish Literature in English, their doctorate was awarded the 2019-2020 Swapna Dev Memorial Prize for the best doctoral thesis in English literature at the University of Oxford. Other research interests include the social history of medicine, queer modernisms, and the cultural politics of censorship and obscenity. Their work has appeared in the Review of English Studies, The Library, and the Irish Studies Review, where they were awarded the 2017 British Association of Irish Studies Essay Prize, and has been featured in The Times Literary Supplement, The Irish Times¸ and on RTÉ. Lloyd Meadhbh co-hosts the podcast Censored with Aoife Bhreatnach, and co-facilitates the creative non-fiction queer family history project and online community Relatively Queer with K Angel and Erica “ERN” Rivera.
Lloyd Meadhbh is Vice-Chair of the British Association for Irish Studies, a member of the British Society for Literature and Science executive council, a mentor with the Neurodivergent Humanities Network, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. They are also the former convenor of the University of Oxford Modern and Contemporary Literature Research Seminar, co-convenor of the Oxford Critical Theory Network, and co-organizer of the Queer Modernism(s) conference series.
They have lectured, taught, and supervised dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level at a range of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, Goldsmiths College, University of London, the University of West London, and at the London Centres of Fordham and Syracuse Universities. They also provide gender consultancy, gender-diversity training, and outreach workshops for schools, charities such as Be Her Lead, and arts organizations such as the Lyric, Hammersmith, and serve as a Trustee for LGBTQ+ Project in Norfolk and Waveney.
Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston 