Dr Katherine Ebury
School of English
Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature

+44 114 222 6295
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I joined the School of English in September 2012 as Lecturer in Modern Literature. Before that I studied and taught at the University of York. I was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2018. I am currently working on an AHRC-funded project on the death penalty, literature and psychoanalysis from 1900-1950, which is running from 2018-2020.
- Research interests
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My primary research interests are in modernism, literature and science, law and literature, and Irish Studies. My articles have appeared in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature and Society and Animals. I also maintain a secondary interest in contemporary poetry and poetics and have published on poets including John Berryman and Paul Muldoon.
I have been involved with supervising PhD theses on topics including: Margaret Drabble and Iraqi Fiction; Wilfrid Owen and Romanticism; First World War life-writing; Holocaust Studies; and literature and science. I have examined PhDs on the First World War, on Beckett and ecocriticism.
Past public engagement projects have involved charities such as Sheffield Amnesty and Reprieve as well as the Showroom Cinema.
- Publications
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Books
- Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights. Palgrave Macmillan.
Edited books
Journal articles
- Nonhuman Animal Pain and Capital Punishment in Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster”. Society and Animals, 25(5), 436-455. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- “A new science”: Yeats's A Vision and relativistic cosmology. Irish Studies Review, 22(2), 167-183.
- ‘Mulrennan Spoke To Him About Universe And Stars’: Astronomy In A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Dublin James Joyce Journal, 6/7, 90-108.
- Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to West ed. by R. Brandon Kershner and Tekla Mecsnóber. James Joyce Quarterly, 50(3), 853-856.
- Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions ed. by John Holmes (review). Modernism/modernity, 20(1), 159-161.
- 'Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in Finnegans Wake'. Joyce Studies Annual, 2011, 97-121.
Chapters
- Science, the Occult and Irish Drama: Ghosts in Yeats and Beckett In Conrad K, Parsons C & Weng J (Ed.), Science, Technology and Irish Modernism (pp. 229-247). Syracuse University Press
- Introduction In Ebury K & Fraser J (Ed.), Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction Palgrave Macmillan
- Becoming-Animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction In Ebury K & Fraser J (Ed.), Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction
- Stars and Atoms in ‘The Trilogy’, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 154-180). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Yeatsian Cosmology, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 30-65). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Epilogue: International Modernism, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 181-187). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Introduction: Cosmic Modernism, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 1-29). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Joycean Cosmologies, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 66-99). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- The Beckettian Cosmos, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 128-153). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in the Wake, Modernism and Cosmology (pp. 100-127). Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Joyce, James (1882–1941), Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism Routledge
Book reviews
- Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective by Anne C. Dailey. American Imago, 76(2), 269-273.
Website content
- http://blogs.bcu.ac.uk/virtualtheorist/
Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries
Other
- Research group
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In the past I have supervised BA and MA dissertations on topics including modernism, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, queer sexuality, gender and madness, Sylvia Plath, Ibsen, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, WWI, the middlebrow and masculinity theory.
- Teaching activities
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Teaching
- Lit107 Studying Prose
- Lit204 Criticism and Literary Theory
- Lit302 Modern Literature
- Lit303 Contemporary Literature
I have also worked on innovative modules such as Literary Mad Scientists and on Radical Theory, helping students explore unusual texts and contexts.