portrait of Kate bennet wearing blue earrings and smiling into the camera. She has dark hair

Dr Kate Bennett

Subject: English

Background

I read English at Oxford and took my D.Phil here. I held a Junior Research Fellowship and a British Academy Postdoctoral fellowship at Christ Church, after which I was fellow in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After a break I returned to Oxford and for 9 years taught English here at Magdalen. I have been a member of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick University, a research fellow of New College, and am a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. In 2015 my edition of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, weighing in at a not-so-brief 1952 pages, was published; it was described as ‘unprecedented,’ ‘outstanding’, and an ‘astonishing feat of scholarly editing.’ It was a TLS Book of the Year, and in 2017 was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.  In 2023 I decided to write and research full time, while remaining very attached to the college and its alumni.

Research

I am one of the editors of the multi-volumed Oxford edition of the Letters of Alexander Pope, and have just published an essay on worms, bookworms, maggots and other invertebrates in Pope’s world, and the vermiculate world of his satiric imagination.  I am the leading authority on the seventeenth-century biographer and antiquary John Aubrey FRS. In 2015 I published the first annotated critical edition of his best-known work, Brief Lives, and I am now working on a new ‘immersive’ biography. Famously charming and funny, Aubrey was the first to recognise the importance of Avebury and the first to make a plain-table survey of Stonehenge. He was the first folklorist, one of the first garden historians, and the first biographer of Shakespeare, Dr William Harvey, Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes, whose life I am also editing. Aubrey had a unique wish to do justice to the socially overlooked: among his Lives is that of an illiterate man who supplied the Royal Society with specimens. He was an advocate for educational reform, despised corporal punishment, and made copious notes on innovative and kindly teaching methods.  He had a special interest in childhood, and once bought a microscope for a pair of eight-year-old girls and their mother. Following on from these interests in early biography, the ‘familiar’ letter, and satire, I am also working on a book on the history of anecdote.  I also have forthcoming chapters on physical spaces in printed and manuscript texts, and the early lives of John Milton.

Selected Publications

.       ‘Restoration Life-Writing and the Arts of Assembly’, in Matthew C. Augustine and Steven Zwicker (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Restoration (Oxford, 2025).

.       ‘Pope’s Worms’, in Daniel Starza Smith and Heather Wilkinson (eds.), Liber Amicorum H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford, 2024).

.       ‘Brief Lives and Characters’ in Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640—1714 (Oxford, 2024).

·       ‘Many Excellent Good Notes’, in Melvyn New and Anthony W. Lee (eds.), Notes on Footnotes: Annotating Eighteenth Century Literature (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023). 

·       Aubrey’s Villa with Peter Davidson and Kelsey Jackson Williams (Old School Press, 2018).

·       ‘On Mess’, in Harriet Philips and Clare Williams (eds.), A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts (Ashgate, 2017).

·       ‘John Aubrey’s Lives and Fame’ in Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford, 2016).

·       John Aubrey, Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers 2 vols. (Oxford, 2015).

·       ‘John Aubrey and the Rhapsodic Book’, Renaissance Studies 28 (April, 2014), 317—32.

·       ‘John Aubrey and the Printed Book’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 76 (2013), 393—411.