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Staff Profile

Dr Laura Kirkley

Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7782
  • Address: Room 2.18, Percy Building
    Â鶹´«Ã½
    Â鶹´«Ã½ upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Background

I am a first-generation university graduate, born in Â鶹´«Ã½ upon Tyne and raised in Northumberland. I completed my BA at Exeter College Oxford and my postgraduate studies at Trinity Hall Cambridge. On completing my interdisciplinary PhD thesis, which focused on Mary Wollstonecraft, I took up a College Lecturership at The Queen's College Oxford in 2009. In 2011, I returned to Trinity Hall Cambridge as a Research Fellow in Modern Languages (English and French), leaving to join Â鶹´«Ã½ as a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in September 2013.


Qualifications

MA (Oxon); MPhil (Cantab); PhD (Cantab).

Research

I research cross-cultural exchange and women’s writing and translation in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. My work is interdisciplinary, focusing on both English and French literature, and my methodology combines gender and feminist theory with theories of literary and cultural translation and cosmopolitan political philosophy. I have particular expertise in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and other women writers and radicals of the Revolutionary and Romantic eras. My monograph, Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022.


I have a strong research interest in scholarly editing, in particular the editing of works that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. My edition of Caroline of Lichtfield, Thomas Holcroft’s translation of Isabelle de Montolieu’s best-selling novel, was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2013 and reissued as a Routledge paperback edition in 2016. I am currently editing Wollstonecraft's translations for volumes 1 and 3 of The Oxford Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. I have also researched digital editing as part of the research group Animating Text at Â鶹´«Ã½ (ATNU) and envisage future projects exploring interdisciplinary collaboration between the Humanities and Computer Science, particularly in the field of translation.


As one of the founding members of The Gothic Women Project: , I have organised numerous online and in-person events and I am also co-editing The Routledge Companion to Gothic Women Writers with Deborah Russell and Daniel Cook.


Teaching

My undergraduate teaching currently includes:


SEL3445: Unsex'd Females: Feminism in the Age of Revolution and Reaction

SEL2202: Writing New Worlds, 1688-1789

SEL2210: Independent Research Project


I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.

Publications

  • Articles

    • Kirkley L. . Women's Writing 2024, 31(3), 406-421.
    • Kirkley L. . The Keats-Shelley Review 2023, 37(2), 108-122.
    • Kirkley L. . European Romantic Review 2022, 33(1), 1-24.
    • Kirkley L. . Literature Compass 2022, 19(10), e12683.
    • Kirkley L. . Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2015, 38(2), 239-255.
    • Kirkley L. . Translation Studies 2013, 6(3), 277-292.
    • Kirkley L. . Women 2013, 24(4), 315-336.

  • Authored Book

    • Kirkley L. . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

  • Book Chapters

    • Kirkley L. . In: Joy L; Lim J, ed. Women's Literary Education, C. 1690-1850. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp.261-284.
    • Kirkley L. . In: Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp.155-163.
    • Kirkley L. . In: Goodman RT, ed. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.13-26.
    • Kirkley L. . In: Dow, G; Brown, H, ed. Readers, Writers, Salonnières: Female Networks in Europe, 1700-1900. Bern, Oxford, Brussels, Frankfurt-am-Main, Berlin, New York, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2011, pp.93-118.
    • Kirkley L. . In: Toremans, T; Verschueren, W, ed. Crossing Cultures: Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature in the Low Countries. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009, pp.189-200.
    • Kirkley L. Rescuing the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft in translation. In: Van Dijk, S; Fidecaro, A; Partzsch, H; Cossy, V, ed. Femmes écrivains à la croisée des langues / Women Writers at the Crossroads of Languages, 1700-2000. Geneva: Métispresses, 2008.
    • Kirkley L. Elements of the Other: Mary Wollstonecraft and Translation. In: Dow, G, ed. Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.

  • Scholarly Edition

    • Kirkley L. . In: Bending, S and Bygrave, S ed. Chawton House Library Series: Women's Novels 2014. London: Pickering & Chatto, 19, 304.