Dr Kate Bennett

Qualifications

DPhil

Role or Position

Lecturer in English

Email address

kate.bennett@chch.ox.ac.uk

Academic Background

I took my BA at Oxford, and was a Junior Research Fellow and then a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Christ Church. Then I was fellow in English and director of studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, for six years, before resigning to take an extended maternity break. Since then I have been a research fellow at New College before coming to Christ Church.

Undergraduate Teaching

English literature from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century

Research Interests

I am completing a major critical edition of the Brief Lives of the biographer John Aubrey, and beginning an edition of his letters. I am interested in seventeenth and eighteenth century life-writing, the novel, the letter and the epistle, and the drama. I am also interested in the relationship between the early Royal Society, and the development of the life-story. As Aubrey is polymathic, I have found myself rather to my surprise writing on the history of mathematics, the history of the museum, and the history of architecture!

Publications include

‘John Aubrey and the “Lives of our English Mathematical Writers’’ in Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics (OUP, 2009);
`Editing Aubrey' in Marking the Text ed. J. Bray, M. Handley and A. Henry (Scolar Press, 2000);
‘John Aubrey, Hint-Keeper: Life-writing and the Encouragement of Science in the pre-Newtonian Seventeenth Century’ The Seventeenth Century XXII, issue 2 (Autumn, 2007), 358—80;
`John Aubrey's Collections and the Early Modern Museum' Bodleian Library Record XVII, nos. 3--4, (April---Oct. 2001), 213—45.

Hobbies

Cooking, reading, travelling, and gardening. My children encourage me to concentrate on the first of these.

Links

http://royalsociety.org/events/2011/john-aubrey/
http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/cofk/projects/john-aubrey