Murphy, Dr Kathryn

Job Title: Fellow and Tutor in English
College: Oriel
Period/ Subject: Early Modern

Email address: kathryn.murphy@oriel.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My research focuses on the literature and intellectual history of the seventeenth century, especially the relationship between literature and the rise of empiricism; prose style; non-fiction genres, esp. the essay; the interpretation and representation of nature; and the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially metaphysics and Aristotelianism.

I am currently involved in several projects, most of which are collaborative. The first (which is not) is a monograph, entitled Knowledge and Experience in Early Modern English Literature. Covering the period 1605-1690, it examines the literary ramifications of the generative tension between traditional Aristotelianism and new discourses of experience and experiment, particularly in Bacon, Burton, Browne, Milton, and Traherne. I hope to complete the manuscript by October 2012.

I am involved in two collaborative editions of early modern texts: (i) Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1626), which I am editing for the Oxford Francis Bacon with colleagues in Manchester and at the Warburg Institute, and (ii) Thomas Browne’s Urne-Buriall, Garden of Cyrus, Letter to a Friend, and Christian Morals, with Claire Preston, of the University of Birmingham. Both of these projects are due c. 2015/2016.

I am also editing two essay collections. One derives from a collaborative project with Anita Traninger of the Freie Universität, Berlin. Entitled The Emergence of Impartiality, this book brings together contributions on the concept of ‘impartiality’ in England, France, and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second emerges from a conference on the literary essay, which I will edit with Thomas Karshan of the University of East Anglia.

With several colleagues in the English Faculty, I am in the very early stages of a project on academic drama, aimed at bringing to light the texts, culture, and performance of drama within the university in the late medieval and early modern periods.

I have a secondary interest in poetry and philosophy, and have recently written two articles on Geoffrey Hill. In the longer term I am planning a book on poetry, scholasticism, and metaphysics, including chapters on Donne, Coleridge, Hopkins, Eliot, and Hill.

Teaching Areas:

English Papers 1 (History and Theory of the Language); 2 (Shakespeare); 4 (1509-1642); and Classics and English Bridge Papers in Epic, Comedy, and Tragedy. I also teach occasional classes on poetry of more recent periods.

Recent Publications:

“Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot”, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1 (2009), www.northernrenaissance.org
Kathryn Murphy and Richard Todd (eds.), “A man very well studyed”: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden, 2008)
“Introduction” and “‘The Best Pillar of the Order of Sir Francis’: Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib, and Communities of Learning”, in “A man very well studyed”, 3-14 & 273-92
“‘A Likely Story’: Plato’s Timaeus in the Garden of Cyrus”, in Reid Barbour and Claire Preston (eds.), Sir Thomas Browne: The World Proposed (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

Other Information:

I am a member of the editorial board of the series Intersections (Brill, Leiden), which publishes several volumes of essays a year on interdisciplinary topics in early modern studies. I am currently co-editing or working on volumes on: professionalization in the early modern period; consecration and dedication rituals; and the genre of the Politica. I am also interested in late modernist and contemporary poetry, and in Czech and Central European literature. I write reviews on these topics, for e.g. PN Review and Translation and Literature. I also occasionally work on translations, from German and Czech.

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