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Professor Kathryn Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English Language & Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor at Oriel College. Her research focuses on seventeenth-century literary and intellectual culture, blending literature, philosophy, theology, and art. She explores the interplay between form (poetic, rhetorical, and artistic) and thought, with a particular interest in essays, still-life painting, and the relationship between form and idea.
Her recent projects include a biography of Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy) and a study of metaphysical prose in the seventeenth century. She has also edited On Essays: Montaigne to the Present and writes essays on art, including analyses of still-life painting and devotional imagery. Her work frequently bridges literary studies and medical humanities, collaborating with the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre and the TORCH Medical Humanities Hub.
She has curated exhibitions such as Melancholy: A New Anatomy (2021) and is preparing a 2026 exhibition on natural history. Murphy is a series editor for Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture and serves on the editorial boards of Cambridge Quarterly and Edinburgh Critical Studies. She contributes art criticism to Apollo and reviews Czech literature for the Times Literary Supplement.
Her research emphasizes interdisciplinary exploration, examining how form—from sentences to paintings—serves as an instrument of thought. Current projects include a book on still-life painting and the immanence of meaning in objects, alongside ongoing studies of attention, distraction, and decision-making in early modern texts.
