Cyd Sturgess is a visiting Leverhulme Postdoctoral Reseach Fellow in the department of Media and Culture. Their project, Trans:Missions, is a comparative organisational study focusing on festivals for transgender, non-binary and gender-non-conforming filmmakers and films in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Sheffield. Trans:Missions documents the historical development of community-based and activist festivals, while exploring the significance of festival sites to identity- and community building projects. Cyd is further directing a documentary that examines the present-day struggle for survival of these festivals, especially in the face of financial precarity a project that also seeks to connect organisers, creators and visitors across geographical borders.

Cyd's interests and expertise broadly covers studies of gender and sexual diversity, transgender studies, queer femininities, the history of sexology, transcultural sexual knowledge production, discourses of pleasure and desire, German and Dutch socio-cultural history from 1880-1940, queer literature in the early twentieth century, and queer and transgender visual studies. They are the author of the monograph Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire 1918-1940 (2023), and have also published articles on lesbian literature, the failed project of labelling and naming desires, and trans documentary and storytelling. They are currently exploring methods of creating for the archive, as well as queering practices of archival acquisition.