معرفی
Dr Laura McCormick Kilbride serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, where she joined in January 2023, and holds a Fellowship at the Institute for Medical Humanities. Previously, she held a Research Fellowship at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, teaching English Literature and Literary Theory at Cambridge's English Faculty and Creative Writing at its Institute of Continuing Education.
Her research traverses literary theory, poetics, classical reception, theology, religious history, philosophy, cognitive science, and environmental humanities. Current projects interrogate poetry's role as religion's secular substitute (The Church of Blake and Shelley: Poetry and Religion in the Long Nineteenth Century) and Matthew Arnold's reading practices as moral frameworks. She explicitly links cognitive science with literary analysis, examining how poetry fulfills religion's social functions.
Her 2023 chapter "Words Thrown Out: Matthew Arnold’s Version of Isaiah" pioneers analysis of Arnold's secular "cultural tact" replacing figural biblical interpretation, reflecting her signature interdisciplinary fusion of literary criticism, religious studies, and cognitive approaches to textual engagement.
Dr Kilbride actively supervises research postgraduates Isobel Defty and Kieron Barron, welcoming new students in her specialty areas. Her teaching portfolio includes Introduction to Poetry (L1), Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism (L2), and Victorian Literature (L2), with a forthcoming 2024-5 module 'Literature and the Artinatural 1850-1950' exploring garden aesthetics as neglected aesthetic spaces.
