Dr Kathryn Murphy
Fellow and Tutor in English Literature
Organising Tutor for English
Oriel College
Oxford
OX1 4EW
I was an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, where I studied Czech and English Literature. After spending a year teaching and studying in Berlin, I came to Oxford in 2004, for a Masters in English Literature 1550-1780, at Balliol College. I then wrote a doctoral thesis on Aristotle and seventeenth-century literature, and spent three years as a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College. I moved to Oriel in 2010.
Research Interests
My research focuses on seventeenth-century prose and poetry, especially Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Thomas Traherne. I am particularly interested in the interactions between literature, philosophy, and science, and in the new ways which writers in the period found to express the relationship between the mind and the natural world. My current projects include a book provisionally entitled Aristotle and the English Imagination: Knowledge and Experience in Early Modern English Prose, and editions of Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum and Browne’s Urne-Buriall and Garden of Cyrus.
Other interests include the literary essay, contemporary poetry, and connections between twentieth-century poetry and early modern writing. I review poetry and Central European literature for the TLS, PN Review, and Translation and Literature.
I am on the editorial board of the series Intersections, which publishes volumes of essays on interdisciplinary topics in early modern cultural studies; we encourage the submission of relevant proposals for volumes: see http://www.brill.nl/publications/intersections , or contact me for further details.
Teaching
I teach Papers 2 (Shakespeare), 4 (1509-1640), 5 (1640-1740), and 6 (1740-1832), as well as optional topics in those periods. I also teach the Classics and English Bridge Papers, and occasional classes on poetry, etymology, and stylistics.
Selected Publications
‘The Anxiety of Variety: Knowledge and Experience in Montaigne, Burton, and Bacon’, in Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, ed. Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji, and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011).
‘Geoffrey Hill's Conversions’, in Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts, ed. Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2011).
‘In My Opinion, Having Read These Things’, review of Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings, in PN Review 191 36/3 (2010), 18-21.
‘Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1/1 (2009). See http://www.northernrenaissance.org/articles/Jesuits-and-Philosophasters-...
A Man Very Well Studyed: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2008), ed. with Richard Todd.
‘The Best Pillar of the Order of Sir Francis: Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib, and Communities in Learning’, in Murphy and Todd (eds.), A Man Very Well Studyed, 273-94.
‘A Likely Story: Plato’s Timaeus in The Garden of Cyrus’, in Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed, eds. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (Oxford, 2008), 242-57.
‘A Man of Excellent Parts: the manuscript readers of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’, Commentary, TLS 5492 (4 July 2008), 14-15.
Supervision
I am keen to supervise research students in any of my areas of specialism: early modern prose literature, particularly in relationship to philosophy, science, or ideas of nature; the literary essay; late modernist poetry, especially Geoffrey Hill; connections between early modern and twentieth-century literature. I would welcome queries from potential students interested in these areas.
Outreach and Schools
I am happy to speak to school pupils and teachers about studying English at Oxford. Any queries in this regard should be directed to the Outreach Officer.