My research explores the relationship between literary form, technology, science, and social change across the long nineteenth century and its twentieth-century afterlives. I am particularly interested in poetry and poetics, genre, urban modernity, sexuality, and the ways literary texts register and reshape debates about infrastructure, medicine, and the environment. My work brings together approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and human geography.
My first monograph, London’s Lightscape: Modernity, Technology, and Literary Culture, 1880–1950, examines literary and cultural responses to the protracted electrification of London. Drawing on archival research, it argues that attention to genre reshapes our understanding of technological modernity by reading literary modernism alongside popular, middlebrow, and genre fiction, revealing how debates about visibility, surveillance, mobility, and urban life unfolded across a much broader literary landscape.
My second book project, Sex, Energy, and Satire in the Long Nineteenth Century, investigates the intertwined histories of sexual science, vitality discourse, degeneration theory, and satirical print culture from the 1830s into the early twentieth century. Alongside this work, I co-edited Configurations of Creepiness, a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (published August 2026), which brings together literary criticism, creative-critical practice, and queer ecology to explore how literary form responds to affect, perception, and the limits of recognition.
Since 2012, I have taught undergraduate students in the UK and North America and postgraduate students since 2023. I currently teach literature in English from 1830 to present at Merton College, Oxford, where I also supervise undergraduate dissertations, serve as Director of Studies for first-year English students, and co-convene Faculty-wide undergraduate and postgraduate writing workshops.
My teaching ranges across the long nineteenth century, modernism, and contemporary literature, with particular interests in poetry, literary form, genre, and the relationships between literature, science, technology, medicine, and the environment. I enjoy introducing students to a wide range of critical perspectives, including gender and queer theory, postcolonial studies, disability studies, and the history of science and medicine, while encouraging them to develop their own lines of enquiry through close reading and discussion.
In addition to my Oxford teaching, I have designed and taught undergraduate lecture courses, postgraduate seminars, and first-year writing courses at Queen's University (Canada) and the University of New Haven (London). My specialist teaching has included modules and tutorials on Anne Carson, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, the modern short story, contemporary poetry and the environment, poetry and memoirs of the AIDS crisis, literature and medicine, literature and science, modernist satire, anti-colonial modernism, and the Harlem Renaissance. I have supervised undergraduate dissertations on topics ranging from Victorian urban fiction and literature and science to Anne Carson, Virginia Woolf, modernist poetry, censorship, and early twentieth-century science fiction.
Whatever the topic, I aim to create a supportive and intellectually challenging environment in which students become confident, independent readers, writers, and critics.
Dr Laura E. Ludtke studied at the University of British Columbia (BA Hons Classical Studies) and Queen’s University, Canada (BA Hons English; MA Classics; MA English). After completing her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, she returned to Canada to take up a series of fixed-term lecturerships at Queen’s University, returning to the UK in 2018.
She served as Secretary and Treasurer of the British Society for Literature and Science (2021-2023, 2023-2026) and chaired its annual book prize (2022-2025).
Along with Dr Catherine Charlwood, she co-hosted three series of LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast (2019–2022).
Community Involvement
Laura convenes Reading Queer Poetry Circle, a community for reading queer poetry that meets bi-wekkly in Reading, UK.
Public Engagement
