Kate Longworth

Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (Creative Writing: Drama)

Kate Longworth is Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (Creative Writing: Drama) for the Department for Continuing Education and works in the field of modern literary and intellectual history, with a particular focus on English theatre and drama.

Research interests

Kate’s research is concerned with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and intellectual history. Her forthcoming research monograph, currently under development with Oxford University Press, places the story of the modern English poetic drama in a broader history of ideas, consolidating a complex and unacknowledged relationship between experiments in verse drama and the philosophical and political trends of British Hegelianism and idealism, as they in turn relate to ideas of community and spirituality, and to social and educational policy. A follow up volume will start from the conclusion reached by T.S. Eliot at the end of the first, that ‘you cannot revive a ritual without reviving a faith,’ and explore the idea of the poetic drama as a key lever in a burgeoning cultural theology.

Kate has also published on modern print culture and history of the book. She is care experienced, and currently writing about the history of fostering and adoption in England through the lens of her own lived experience.

Publications

• ‘Myth-makers to eternity’: The Idea of the Poetic Drama in England 1897-1928. (in preparation for final submission to OUP)
• ‘The Book and Civil Society’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 7, eds. I. R. Willison, Andrew Nash & Claire Squires, Cambridge University Press, 2019
• 14 Entries for The Oxford Companion to the Book, eds. Michael F. Suarez & Henry Woudhuysen, Oxford University Press, 2009.
• ‘Between Then and Now: Modern Book History’, Literature Compass 4 (2007).