Eleanor Medhurst

Eleanor Medhurst is a Technē funded research student in the School of Humanities and Social Science. Her main research area is queer visual and material culture, or fashion and design history more broadly. She specialises in lesbian fashion history, lesbian craft practices, and colour symbolism in queer contexts.

Eleanor holds a BA in Fashion and Dress History and an MA in History of Design and Material Culture from the University of Brighton. She worked as an independent researcher for five years before beginning her PhD. Within this period she produced accessible, online resources with wide public appeal as well as peer-reviewed, published writing – from her website, dressingdykes.com, to bite-size social media content. 

She has published work in the peer-reviewed journals TEXTILE (2022) and Journal of Lesbian Studies (2023), and in the edited scholarly books Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain (Fountain, 2023) and Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender and Subjectivity (Ryan-Flood and Tooth Murphy, 2024). In 2024, Eleanor's first book, Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion was published by Hurst.

Eleanor has spoken at numerous conferences, and has lectured and spoken internationally at academic, literary, and arts and heritage locations. In 2017-2018 Eleanor was a team member for the Queer Looks display at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (a HLF-funded community-curated exhibition of queer dress, plus accompanying events programme) and in 2019-2020 worked on Brighton Museum's community-curated exhibition Queer the Pier.