Key details
Dr Katarina Stenke
Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-century Literature
Dr Katarina Stenke joined the University of Greenwich in 2017 as Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature. She leads and teaches on a range of undergraduate and MA Literature modules, and supervises a variety of research projects at MA and PhD level.
Dr Stenke was born and attended school in Luxembourg before moving to Ireland and the UK to pursue higher education. After completing a BA (Hons) in English Literature at University College, Dublin she obtained her MPhil and PhD in Eighteenth-century Literature at the University of Cambridge, where she subsequently held a fixed-term career development post as Director of Studies and College Lecturer at Gonville and Caius College as well as teaching on a variety of summer-school programmes.
Dr Stenke has supervised graduate research topics on a range of topics and authors, including John Milton, eighteenth-century periodicals, Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Mary Prince, nineteenth-century British and American literature, H.G.Wells, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, African-American historical fiction and literary and screen adaptation. I am happy to supervise graduate students on projects relating to literary history, cultural theory, literary/screen adaptation and/or 18th- or early 19th-century topics.
Responsibilities within the university
Module leader for BA and MA modules, both core and option, doctoral supervision, member of steering-group for Centre for Research in Language & Heritage, Assessment Misconduct Office for School of Humanities and Social Sciences, internal assessor for REF research outputs.
Recognition
Member: British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS); British Association for Romanti Studies; Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)
Research / Scholarly interests
Dr Stenke's research and teaching interests cover English-language literatures and cultures of the long eighteenth century; intersectionality in eighteenth-century women's literature; eighteenth-century Atlantic world literature; orientalism and representation of alterity; gender and religion; eighteenth-century (eco)poetics; decolonial scholarship and pedagogy.
Throughout her career, she has been fascinated by the tacit rules and boundaries of different discourses and genres, and by the relative 'elasticity' of different literary and cultural norms: at the most abstract, this means investigating who gets to speak in a given literary space, what can be spoken, and how that speaking might in turn transform the literary space (genre, discourse, publication venue) itself.
Dr Stenke has published research on a variety of related topics in eighteenth-century literature and culture, often with a material-culture focus, such as the politics and theology of mazes and statues in James Thomson's long poem The Seasons and gendered temporalities in Graveyard poetry. More recent publications include a co-edited essay collection, Impolite Periodicals: Reading for Rudeness in the Eighteenth-Century (Bucknell University Press, 2026); a chapter on the politics of voice in Phillis Wheatley Peters that will appear in The Lives, Writings, and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters, ed. by Barbara McCaskill, Mona Narain and Sarah Ruffing Robbins (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming August 2026); and a journal article on gendered temporalities in late-eighteenth-century watch-paper poetry, due for publication in Women’s Writing early next year.
Media activity
Rutgers University Press blog post on recent edited book publication: https://tinyurl.com/mvbheywa