Alan Lee

I am a techne-funded research student and visiting lecturer at the University of Roehampton. I am now in the final year of my research process, due to submit my thesis on March 31^st. My thesis, Symbols of Pride & the Politics of Queer Liberation, interrogates prevailing silences and uninterrogated assumptions in scholarship on Pride symbols and the Pride March in London between 1972 and 2022. Reconciling archival traces of these symbols with popular understandings and academic literature, it demonstrates the role these symbols have played in visualising the politics of the queer and trans* liberation movements. My wider research interests are on modern British history, German history, the history of the Cold War, and social movements from 1968 onwards. I am particularly interested in how symbols, such as flags, have been used in the process of community-based identity formation. This began with my undergraduate dissertation, which explored the history of Weimar Germany’s flaggenstreit (flag debate), and followed through my master’s dissertation on the competition for legitimacy between the two Cold War German states.

I have steadily sought to share my research in academic circles throughout my PhD. This began with opportunities to engage with the postgraduate community at the university, and has since progressed as my research has evolved. I presented aspects of my master’s dissertation at the Institute of Historical Research in January 2024, highlighting a previously undiscovered archival source that shows the escalation of tension in divided Berlin when East German flags were flown on S. Bahn stations throughout Berlin in 1959. This research is being transformed into an article which I am aiming to submit for publication after the completion of my thesis. In July, 2024, shared the progress of my research at the European Conference on Politics and Gender at Ghent University, taking my research to an international level. From this conference came an opportunity to contribute to an edited volume on Pride, which is expected to be published with Manchester University Press. I have reviewed two exemplary pieces of literature in recent queer scholarship, by Sébastien Tremblay and Anna Hájková respectively, and have a forthcoming blogpost with History Matters on the controversies surrounding flying a rainbow flag at the Stonewall National Monument. I am currently planning a research seminar and roundtable for May, in which I will publicly share the findings of my research.

I have taught on various modules at the university over the last year, consecutively contributing to the the Historical Controversies module, which introduces second year undergraduate history students to historiographical debates in scholarship. My session explores Robert Beachy’s argument that homosexuality was invented in nineteenth century Germany. In the 2025/26 academic year, I also convened a module on the Cold War, entitled Boiling Points: Crises and Conflicts in the Cold War. Taking a global approach to the Cold War, this module explored the most tense periods of history between 1945 and 1991, with the final session exploring the legacies of this period of history today.