Rate My Professor Jana Funke

Professor Jana Funke is Professor of Modern Literature and Sexuality Studies in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a Master's degree in English from the University of Oxford. Her career at the University of Exeter includes positions as Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Medical History, Senior Lecturer in English and Medical Humanities, and her current professorship. Funke's research interests center on modernist literature and culture, the history of sexuality and sexual science, queer temporality, feminist science, trans history, digital and public humanities, and medical humanities.

She has edited and co-edited key volumes such as Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, co-edited with Ben Davies), The World and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall (Manchester University Press, 2016), Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, co-edited with Jen Grove), Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2023, co-edited with Elizabeth English and Sarah Parker), and the first scholarly edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Oxford University Press, 2024, co-edited with Hannah Roche). Her peer-reviewed articles appear in journals including History of the Human Sciences, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. Funke has received significant funding, including a Wellcome Trust Joint Investigator Award for co-directing the Rethinking Sexology project with Kate Fisher, Wellcome Trust grants for Transvengers and Adventures in Time and Gender, an AHRC grant as principal investigator for 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness, and National Lottery Heritage Fund support for Out and About: Queering the Museum. Through these and public engagement activities like the Queer Stones installation and museum collaborations, her scholarship has advanced academic and public understanding of LGBTQ+ histories and sexual science.