Katie Murphy

I have a brief review in this week's @thetls.bsky.social of a novel by Nicol Hochholczerová, This Room Is Difficult to Eat. For reasons into the which I will not go, it was difficult for me to read -- but I'm glad I did.

Like a piscatory eclogue?

PhD: AHRC Studentship | University of Exeter Project descriptionThe University of Exeter is offering up to three fully funded AHRC doctoral studentships and training and development opportunities across a range of the AHRC’s disciplines for cand...

Here at Exeter we are offering three fully funded AHRC PhD places in humanities subjects. Please get in touch if you are keen to come and do research with us! Closing date 23 February 2026: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

Decontextualised comments from the margins of a student essay, or, let's play a game of "Guess what I'm teaching?":

'Organs, or essence?'

The Cambridge History of the British Essay Cambridge University Press. 2024. 857 pages.

Nice review of the Cambridge History of the British Essay, eds Denise Gigante & Jason Childs, a big and various book which was fun to write for. Includes quotation of the silliest sentence in my essay.

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/novembe...

The Cambridge History of the British Essay Cambridge University Press. 2024. 857 pages.

Nice review of the Cambridge History of the British Essay, eds Denise Gigante & Jason Childs, a big and various book which was fun to write for. Includes quotation of the silliest sentence in my essay.

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/novembe...

Hooray for you!!!!

Deadline for abstracts for John Donne's Architecture is this Friday. Looking forward to reading them!

Maybe I'll get on board with this AI lark after all, if it starts claiming that I have coined 'key concepts in literary theory' when all I was up to was trying to find a link to an essay I wrote. Then again, as it says at the bottom, 'AI responses may include mistakes'.

Can we lengthen your name?

Kathryn Murphy - A Devotion to Art Kathryn Murphy: A Devotion to Art - Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon

My review of Andrew Graham-Dixon's new biography of Vermeer is out. I was charmed, intrigued, amused, and unconvinced.

literaryreview.co.uk/a-devotion-t...

Excellent news for Oriel specifically, especially in our 700th year!

Exciting news from Cambridge, where a donation has funded a permanent lectureship (sorry, “Assistant Professorship”) in the History of Knowledge Pre-1400. The only explicit restriction is “not medicine”, but it is in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/53305/

Advice in a 1944 Colloquial Hungarian textbook; useful for the internet age.

A view askew of the geometrically complicated ceiling of the new Schwarzman Humanities building at Oxford.

Obligatory Oxford-academic's-first-trip-to-the-Schwarzman photo.

Its revival seems, well, timely. I should have advertised earlier but have been ill, & didn't know if I'd be able to make it. Very glad to say I will. I'm looking forward to talking about distraction, attention, & the necessity of boredom, now and in the seventeenth century.

Scholars from Oxford, & poets & writers of more independent attachment, met to discuss & write theology, poetry, & natural knowledge. It thrived in the 1620s & 1630s, & was abrupted by the Civil Wars, in which Cary died: its eirenicism extinguished in the brute polarisation of the mid-century.

The new Great Tew Circle revives the c17th reading & discussion group, engine of thinking on reasonable religion, peaceable controversy, & natural philosophy, wch met at the manor house of Lucius Cary, & involved Jonson, Hobbes, the Earl of Clarendon, Edmund Waller, Abraham Cowley, &c.

Great Tew Circle redux! I will be giving a talk on *Saturday evening* at the parish church in the village of Great Tew, in the Cotswolds, under the title 'The Anxiety of Variety: Attention Crisis in the Seventeenth Century'. Come, if you can! www.charlbury.info/events/10338

This should be a blast! John Donne and architecture, cfp below.

Today is publication day for PAPER AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE! Available in paper or digital form www.pennpress.org/978151282744... @pennpress.bsky.social

Haven't followed Czech politics for ages, and now discover I have to get my head round parties and groupings called 'Motorists for Themselves', 'That was enough!', 'Stan' (acronym for 'Mayors and Independents'), and 'Together'. I already knew about 'YES' and the Pirates.

New Scottish poetry magazine, ed. by poets Tom Docherty and Molly Vogel, seeks submissions! First issue spring 2026. (Scottish in that the editors are based in Scotland; poems of all kinds & origins considered: short & long; in verse or prose; formal & less so.)

www.arderythhouse.com

Richardson’s Punctilios In a letter to the poet Stephen Duck in 1741, Richardson met criticisms of his latest work-in-progress, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (the socially eleva

Louise Curran wrote a really great review of the new Cambridge ed of SCG in Cambridge Quarterly recently, 'Richardson's Punctilios': academic.oup.com/camqtly/arti...

Okay maybe AI is great after all.

If the theme of the group can just be the items in the group, listed, then any four things is a group. I like the chutzpah, though it makes the game a lot harder.

It is true that my copy of _Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588-1638_ is unlikely to inspire an article on How Kathryn Murphy Read Her Hotson.

It's possible you told me this in 2004.

Long before 'cozzy livs' and 'platty jubes', Scots were suffering from the 'shakky trimmles'.

An opportunity of a lifetime for budding lichenologists. The National Trust and the Royal Botanics, Edinburgh are offering a PAID lichen traineeship in #Scotland! The work programme looks fascinating and a great opportunity to develop skills. Deadline: 3/10/2025. www.asva.co.uk/jobs/trainee...