With thanks to our authors Dr Sean Brady & Dr Matt Cook of Birkbeck College, University of London, Dr Emma Vickers of Reading University and Professor Sally R Munt of the University of Sussex.

Dr Sean Brady is Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research interest focuses on gender, sexuality, politics, and religion in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. His publications include Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861 - 1913 (Palgrave Macmillan 2005 and 2009), What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, edited with John H. Arnold (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Homosexuality: a critical edition of sources (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). He is convening editor for Palgrave Macmillan's academic series, ‘Genders and Sexualities in History'.

Dr Matt Cook is Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Co-Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. He is author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885 - 1914 (2003) and editor of A Gay History of Britain (2007), and is current completing a book on Queer Domesticities in the twentieth century.

Professor Sally R Munt is Professor of Cultural Studies and Gender Studies and Director of the Sussex Centre for CUltural Studies. She has strong interests in sexuality, gender, and class, narrative, space, spiritualities, otherness, paranormality and resilience. In 2008-9 Sally was the Principal Investigator for a significant AHRC/ESRC funded project in the Religion and Society Programme, called 'Queer Spiritual Space(s): An investigation into the practices queer spiritual communities using case studies, (Quakers, Buddhists, Findhorn Community (New Age), Muslims, Michigan Womyns Festival (Wiccan and others), and the 'non-aligned spiritually curious' online)'.  See further queerspiritualspaces.com

Books by Sally include: Paranormal Cultures (co-edited with Olu Jenzen).Ashgate Publishing. 25 chapters, 30 illustrations. 120,000 words. Intended publication 2012. Queer Spiritual Spaces: Sexualities and Sacred Places. (co-author with Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip and Kath A. Browne). Ashgate Publishers, 2010. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. (author) Ashgate Publishers, 2007, (2008). Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (author) New York University Press, New York, 1998; Cassell Academic - Contemporary Studies Series, London, 1998 Butch /Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender (editor). Cassell Academic - Contemporary Studies Series, London & Washington, 1998 Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction (co-editor) Cassell Academic - Contemporary Studies Series, London & Washington, 1997 New Lesbian Criticism : Literary and Cultural Readings (editor) Columbia University Press, New York, 1992; Harvester Wheatsheaf/Simon & Schuster, Hemel Hempstead, 1992.

Dr Emma Vickers: I'm a British social historian with an interest in gender and war, commemoration, the history of sexuality, oral testimony and public history. I run a first year Approaches module on the diaries of Nella Last.

I also run a third year course, 'War and Sexuality in the British Armed Forces, 1914-1945'and a second year module, 'Sex in Britain, 1815-1980'.

Publications:"The Good Fellow": Negotiation, Remembrance, and Recollection - Homosexuality in the British Armed Forces, 1939-1945‟ in Dagmar Herzog(ed.) Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2008).'Infantile desires and perverted practices: disciplining lesbianism in the WAAF and the ATS during the Second World War‟, The Lesbian Studies Journal, volume 13 issue 4 2009, pp. 431 - 441.'Queer Sex in the City? Place, subjectivity and the Second World War‟, Feminist Review, Special issue: Urban Spaces, (96, October 2010).Queen and County: Homosexuality in the British Armed Forces,1939-1945(Manchester: Manchester U.P., forthcoming, 2011)."The Forgotten Army of the Woods": The Women's Timber Corps during the Second World War', Agricultural History Review, (forthcoming, Part 1/2, 2011).