Kate Longworth’s research is concerned with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and intellectual history. Her forthcoming book (Oxford University Press, 2027) 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 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.
She has also published on modern print culture and history of the book. She is care experienced, and currently writing both critically and creatively about the history and narrative framing of fostering and adoption in England through the lens of her own lived experience.
