Oxford University Announces UK’s First LGBTQ+ History Professorship

People protest in Oxford where Professor Kathleen Stock, who quit her job as a lecturer at
Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

Oxford announced this week the creation of the United Kingdom’s first permanent ‘Professorship in LGBTQ+ History’ at the English-speaking world’s oldest university.

Professor Matt Cook will become the UK’s first professor of LGBTQ+ history at Oxford University’s Mansfield College following the donation of £4.9 million from the Arcadia Fund, a charity with the stated mission of defending the “complexity of human culture and the natural world” in order to build a “vibrant, resilient and green future.”

Oxford described Prof Cook, the author of such works as London and the Culture of Homosexuality and A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men since the Middle Ages, as a social and cultural historian.

In 2017, Cook co-authored the National Trust’s first LGBTQ guidebook, Prejudice and Pride, and is said to have written on issues such as “queer urban life”, queer domesticity, and HIV/Aids.

Cook will also become the first Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities, a position named after deceased English lawyer Jonathan Cooper OBE, a legal activist who campaigned against Brexit and for the inclusion of LGBT people into the armed forces.

Commenting on his appointment, Professor Cook said: “Jonathan Cooper was a passionate advocate for LGBTQ rights, and it’s a huge honour to take up this new professorship in his name. I will be working hard to enhance our understanding of the LGBTQ past and to show how these histories matter now.

“I will be championing the strong, existing vein of queer historical work at Oxford and fostering debate with LGBTQ scholars, writers, and activists from around the world.

“I’m tremendously excited to have this opportunity to help enlarge Oxford’s reputation for cutting-edge work in this burgeoning field; I see it as a way of honouring and furthering Jonathan Cooper’s inspirational legacy.”

Last month, the university saw its Oxford Union debating society taken over by leftist LGBTQ activists who rushed the ancient seat of learning with one protester glueing herself to the floor in order to disrupt a speach from feminist Philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock.

Stock, who was forced out from her post at the University of Sussex in 2021 amid backlash over a book she had published on gender and sex, which did not align with modern woke ideaologuy on the subject, critisied the current climate of academia, saying that former institutions of learning have become “propaganda machines for a particular point of view”.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter: or e-mail to: kzindulka@breitbart.com

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