Professor Kathryn Murphy
I work primarily on seventeenth-century literary and intellectual culture, though with forays into later periods, art-writing, and other topics. One of the things that appeals most to me about the early modern period is the lack of boundaries between domains such as literature, philosophy, what we now call 'science', theology, and art, and I try to honour that eclecticism in my own reading, thinking, and writing. My primary interests are early modern literature, philosophy, and theology; the genre of the essay, from Montaigne to the present; still-life and devotional painting; and the relationship between poetic form, rhetorical figure, and theological and philosophical ideas. I have recently written on quaintness, disappearing feet, cheese and insects, distractibility, melancholy, enjambment, infinity, stillicides, and the literature of failing to make decisions. I am always interested in how form – the sentence, the poetic or drawn line, the stanza, syntax, grammatical structures – can be an instrument of thought or thinking.
I am most frequently to be found in the seventeenth century, and writing about non-fiction prose. My book, Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy, will be published by Reaktion in 2026. The first book-length biography of Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), it is also a study of the Anatomy as a massive contraption for the interplay of attention and distraction; and an argument that a life of reading, thinking, and writing is as rich in experience as any more active vita. My next book after that, The Tottering Universal: Metaphysical Prose in the Seventeenth Century, examines the ways in which seventeenth-century English writers responded to what I call 'the anxiety of variety' – the concern that the human intellect can never be adequate to the teeming, various, incorrigibly plural world – and how they developed a vernacular philosophical style from the generative tension between traditional Aristotelian styles of thinking, and new discourses of experience and experiment. There are chapters on Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, Lancelot Andrewes, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, and the obscure but wonderful Nathaniel Fairfax.
In recent years I have also published several essays on the essay (even essays on essays on essays), emerging from the volume On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020) which I edited with Thomas Karshan. Those have included work on the essay form as defined by what I call ‘prepositionality’, in a piece called ‘On On’ (2022), which reads Emily Ogden and Brian Blanchfield alongside Montaigne; on the essay and the moment, in ‘On Occasion’ (2023), which discusses Montaigne, Bacon, Boyle, and Teju Cole; on the origins of the English essay in a tension between indecision and decision (‘Surprised into Form’, 2024); and on essays and experience in the period 1640–1714 (‘Essays’, 2024).
I have also been writing a series of short essays on art: among other topics, I have written on cheese and insects in still life, on curtains in painting, on touching art and noli me tangere paintings, on pots, pans, and distraction in Chardin and other painters, all for Apollo; and on wood, wounds, and living substance in sculpture, for Frieze Masters. I hope, eventually, to write a book on still life painting and the immanence of meaning and thinking in objects.
I also enjoy writing and speaking for a wider public. I regularly review modern Czech fiction for the TLS, and art criticism for Apollo. In 2021, I was a lead curator of the Bodleian exhibition Melancholy: A New Anatomy, in collaboration with colleagues from the departments of Psychiatry and Psychology; and I appeared in 2020 on the Radio 4 series The New Anatomy of Melancholy, presented by Amy Liptrot. I continue to collaborate with colleagues in medical science, including on the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre’s Flourishing strand, and via the TORCH Medical Humanities Research Hub. In 2026, I will be curating another exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Plain Things Wonders, which will display the history of natural history and of paying attention to quotidian things.
I am also a series editor for Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture, and reviews editor and member of the editorial board at Cambridge Quarterly. I would be happy to hear from potential contributors to either.
For further details of my in-print publications, please see the 'Publications' page.
For undergraduates, I teach English Papers 1 (Shakespeare); 3 (1550–1660); 4 (1660–1760); and Classics and English Bridge Papers in Epic, Comedy, and Tragedy, as well as optional courses, for undergraduates and graduates, on topics such as the essay, early modern alphabets and lettering, and forms of thought and thinking in the seventeenth century. I also lecture and teach occasional classes on poetry and essays of more recent periods. In recent years I have lectured for the faculty on science, nature, and genre in the seventeenth century, metaphysical poetry, the essay, early modern prose, and the poetry of Geoffrey Hill.
I have supervised graduate students on a wide range of topics: e.g. Geoffrey Hill; early modern science and fiction; Robert Burton and boredom; error in seventeenth-century prose and drama; polemical pamphlet literature of the 1590s; naming and categorization in Thomas Browne; early modern alchemy; Abraham Cowley; Renaissance dust; early modern travel writing; literature and cartography; literature and architecture; essays and revision. I would be very happy to hear from any potential graduate students interested in pursuing research in any of my areas of specialism.
Monographs
Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy (forthcoming: London: Reaktion, 2026)
Edited books:
On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present, ed. with Thomas Karshan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pb. 2021)
The Emergence of Impartiality, ed. with Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2013)
Conflicting Values of Inquiry: Ideologies of Epistemology in Early Modern Europe, ed. with Tamás Demeter and Claus Zittel (Leiden: Brill, 2013)
A Man Very Well Studyed: New Contexts for Thomas Browne, ed. with Richard Todd (Leiden: Brill, 2008)
Journal Articles:
‘On Occasion: The Essay’s Moment’, CounterText 9/3 (2023), 390–408
‘Bizarre Numerousness’, Spenser Studies 23 (2023), 413–23
‘On On: The Essay as Prepositionality’, ASAP Journal (Cluster: The Contemporary Essay, May 2022), online.
‘Fulke Greville’s Figures of Repetition’, Essays in Criticism 65/3 (2015), 250–73
‘The Physician’s Religion and salus populi: The Manuscript Circulation and Print Publication of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici’, Studies in Philology 111/4 (2014), 845–75
‘Robert Burton and the Problems of Polymathy’, Renaissance Studies 28/2 (2014), 279–97
‘Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hobbes, and the Rhetoric of Realism’, The Seventeenth Century 28/4 (2013), 419–39
‘Jesuits and Philosophasters: Robert Burton’s Response to the Gunpowder Plot’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 1 (2009), (http://www.northernrenaissance.org/)
Book Chapters:
‘Surprised into Form: The Beginnings of the English Essay’, in The Cambridge History of the English Essay (Cambridge: CUP, 2024), 18–31
‘Essays’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power (Oxford: OUP, 2024), 266–82
‘Walter Pater and the Quaintness of English Prose’, in Walter Pater and the Study of English Literature, eds Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Oxford: OUP, 2023), 176–97
‘Of Sticks and Stones: The Essay, Experience, and Experiment’, in Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present (Oxford: OUP, 2020), 78–96
‘On the Difficulty of Introducing a Work of this Kind: Introduction’, in Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, On Essays: From Montaigne to the Present (Oxford: OUP, 2020), 1–30
‘The End of Poetry: Teleology in Philip Sidney’s Sonnets’, in Teleology: A History, ed. Jeffrey K. McDonough (Oxford: OUP, 2020), 180–5
‘Fulke Greville’s Scantlings: Architecture, Measure, and the Defence of Modular Poesy’, in Measure of the Mind: Fulke Greville and the Literary Culture of the English Renaissance, ed. Russ Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 47–61
‘No Things But In Thought: Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Realism’, in Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-Century Thought, ed. Cassandra Gorman and Elizabeth S. Dodd (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2016), 48–68
‘A Disagreeing Likeness: Michel de Montaigne, Robert Burton, and the Problem of Idiosyncrasy’, in Montaigne in Transit: Essays for Ian Maclean, ed. Neil Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams (Oxford: Legenda, 2016), 223–38
‘Introduction’, with Anita Traninger, in The Emergence of Impartiality, eds. Murphy and Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–29
‘Geoffrey Hill and Confession’, in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Later Work, ed. John Lyon and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 127–42.
‘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, 2011), 110–30
‘Geoffrey Hill’s Conversions’, in Geoffrey Hill and His Contexts, ed. Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 61–80
‘Introduction’ and ‘The Best Pillar of the Order of Sir Francis: Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib, and Communities of Learning’, in Murphy and Todd (eds), “A man very well studyed”: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 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: Oxford University Press, 2008), 242–57
