Jonathan Dollimore is a literary theorist, specialising in the fields of Renaissance literature (especially drama), art, censorship and the history of ideas, and a trailblazer in the study of gender and queer theory. At the University of Sussex, he co-founded the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. He later became Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Dollimore is credited with making major interventions in debates on sexuality and desire, transgression, perversion and decadence within cultural theory.