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Lewis O'Hare
What’s the Crack? Mapping social justice histories in the North-East of England 1985-2025.
Supervisors: Dr Gareth Longstaff, Dr Stacy Gillis, Dr Chloe Ashbridge
I began my AHRC Northern Bridge funded PhD project in September 2025 in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle. I hold an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature, and my MLitt Research Masters was also in English Literature. Both my Undergraduate and MLitt Dissertations were cross-disciplinary projects interested in contemporary representations of queerness as a regionally-inflected positionality. I have experience as a research assistant and have 2 years’ experience as a service coordinator in an academic library.
My PhD project is a Collaborative Doctoral Project, working with The Crack magazine, and will produce the first radical social justice history of the North East – intersectionally centred around gender, sexuality, race and class – using the archives of the magazine. The Crack emerged in 1985 in response to Thatcherite ideologies and has remained responsive to other social justice-led movements pertaining to feminist, queer, working-class and non-white communities in the region. Henceforth, the project reads the magazine’s archive as a resource for challenging established disciplinary orthodoxies around North East cultural identity and literary regionalism more widely and the project offers a critical reappraisal of the local magazine as a ‘decentralising’ genre.
My research interests sit broadly across the disciplines of English Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Geography and Politics.
My primary research interests are concerned with Queer Theory and contemporary (literary) representations of the North of England. Specifically, those that challenge and revise the dominant cultural framing of the North as a region that is emphatically white, working-class, masculine and heterosexual. My research interrogates this cultural framing and maps the emergence of new and heterogeneous representations of the North with reference to Britain’s response (at the state, regional, local and community levels) to key political junctures since 1980. I am also interested in shifting representations of the body and desire under neoliberalism.
Outside of my research, I enjoy staying active, travelling, reading contemporary fiction and spending time with my partner, friends and family.
