Gregory Evans

Research Topic

AIDS in Rural Wales: An Oral History Investigation into Sexuality, Rurality, and Identity in 1980s/1990s Britain.

Supervisors: William Whyte and Matt Cook

I am a social historian of modern Britain, specialising in culture, place, and sexuality.

My DPhil research focuses on the AIDS epidemic in Wales. An oral history, it asks – how do rural people's testimonies challenge existing  understandings of the AIDS epidemic in Britain. In doing so it confronts understandings of sexuality and queer identity in the period, as well as much wider conceptualisations within the historiography of post-war Britian. I am interested in discourses of sexuality, urbanity and rurality, neoliberalism, gender, and nation.

I am from South Wales, where I was educated at St Joseph’s Comprehensive School. I completed a BA at the University of Bristol, receiving the Faculty commendation for Outstanding Performance. I then completed a Masters degree at St John’s College, Oxford, where I was awarded funding from the James Pantyfedwen Trust. Prior to starting my AHRC funded D.Phil study, I worked as a Project Manager with the UK Government’s Cabinet Office. 

My previous research has focused on emotion and sexuality in interwar London; the architectural history of Cwmbran New Town; Modernity and The City at the fin de siècle; New Romantic subculture in 1980s East London; and the role of ecology in Britain’s first Nature Reserves.