Staff Profile

Background

I am a first-generation university graduate, born in Newcastle upon Tyne and raised in Northumberland. I completed my BA at Exeter College Oxford and my postgraduate studies at Trinity Hall Cambridge. On completing my interdisciplinary PhD thesis, which focused on Mary Wollstonecraft, I took up a College Lecturership at The Queen's College Oxford in 2009. In 2011, I returned to Trinity Hall Cambridge as a Research Fellow in Modern Languages (English and French), leaving to join Newcastle University as a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in September 2013.

Qualifications

MA (Oxon); MPhil (Cantab); PhD (Cantab).

Google Scholar

I research cross-cultural exchange and women’s writing and translation in the eighteenth century and Romantic period. My work is interdisciplinary, focusing on both English and French literature, and my methodology combines gender and feminist theory with theories of literary and cultural translation and cosmopolitan political philosophy. I have particular expertise in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and other women writers and radicals of the Revolutionary and Romantic eras. My monograph, Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022.

I have a strong research interest in scholarly editing, in particular the editing of works that cross linguistic and cultural boundaries. My edition of Caroline of Lichtfield, Thomas Holcroft’s translation of Isabelle de Montolieu’s best-selling novel, was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2013 and reissued as a Routledge paperback edition in 2016. I am currently editing Wollstonecraft's translations for volumes 1 and 3 of The Oxford Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. I have also researched digital editing as part of the research group Animating Text at Newcastle University (ATNU) and envisage future projects exploring interdisciplinary collaboration between the Humanities and Computer Science, particularly in the field of translation.

As one of the founding members of The Gothic Women Project: Gothic Women | 2023: The Year of Gothic Women. An interdisciplinary project devoted to spotlighting undervalued and understudied women writers, I have organised numerous online and in-person events and I am also co-editing The Routledge Companion to Gothic Women Writers with Deborah Russell and Daniel Cook.

My undergraduate teaching currently includes:

SEL3445: Unsex'd Females: Feminism in the Age of Revolution and Reaction

SEL2202: Writing New Worlds, 1688-1789

SEL2210: Independent Research Project

I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.

• Articles

  • Kirkley L. 'L'Esprit de Charité': Universal Benevolence in Wollstonecraft's Of The Importance of Religious Opinions. Women's Writing 2024, 31(3), 406-421.
  • Kirkley L. 'Bound in Amity to All': Euthanasia’s Cosmopolitan Ethic of Caring. The Keats-Shelley Review 2023, 37(2), 108-122.
  • Kirkley L. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Translational Afterlife: French and German Rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the Revolutionary Era. European Romantic Review 2022, 33(1), 1-24.
  • Kirkley L. Across disciplines, languages, and nations: Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft. Literature Compass 2022, 19(10), e12683.
  • Kirkley L. Maria, ou Le Malheur d'être femme: Translating Mary Wollstonecraft in Revolutionary France. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2015, 38(2), 239-255.
  • Kirkley L. The Question of Language: postcolonial translation in the bilingual collections of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Paul Muldoon. Translation Studies 2013, 6(3), 277-292.
  • Kirkley L. Hélène Cixous's Autre Bisexualité and the Eternal Feminine in the works of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Women 2013, 24(4), 315-336.

• Authored Book

  • Kirkley L. Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

• Book Chapters

  • Kirkley L. Pedagogy as (Cosmo)politics: Cultivating Benevolence in Mary Wollstonecraft's Educational Works. In: Joy L; Lim J, ed. Women's Literary Education, C. 1690-1850. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp.261-284.
  • Kirkley L. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In: Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp.155-163.
  • Kirkley L. 'Original Spirit': Literary Translations and Translational Literature in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. In: Goodman RT, ed. Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.13-26.
  • Kirkley L. Translating Rousseauism: Transformations of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie in the works of Helen Maria Williams and Maria Edgeworth. In: Dow, G; Brown, H, ed. Readers, Writers, Salonnières: Female Networks in Europe, 1700-1900. Bern, Oxford, Brussels, Frankfurt-am-Main, Berlin, New York, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2011, pp.93-118.
  • Kirkley L. Feminism in translation: Re-writing the Rights of Women. In: Toremans, T; Verschueren, W, ed. Crossing Cultures: Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literature in the Low Countries. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009, pp.189-200.
  • Kirkley L. Rescuing the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft in translation. In: Van Dijk, S; Fidecaro, A; Partzsch, H; Cossy, V, ed. Femmes écrivains à la croisée des langues / Women Writers at the Crossroads of Languages, 1700-2000. Geneva: Métispresses, 2008.
  • Kirkley L. Elements of the Other: Mary Wollstonecraft and Translation. In: Dow, G, ed. Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.

• Scholarly Edition

  • Kirkley L. Caroline of Lichtfield by Isabelle de Montolieu. In: Bending, S and Bygrave, S ed. Chawton House Library Series: Women's Novels 2014. London: Pickering & Chatto, 19, 304.