Dr Claire Hurley

A graduate of the English department at the University of Kent, Claire took up a lectureship in American and 20th Century Literature in September 2018. Claire’s research areas include 20th century American experimental poetry, feminist theory and contemporary radical politics.
A 50th Anniversary PhD Scholarship Holder, Claire’s PhD entitled, ‘The Poetics of Site: Reading the Spaces of Experimental US Women Poets,’ centred on three innovative 20th Century American women poets: Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest and Susan Howe. Taking inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it examined how these poets inhabited specific compositional sites. Drawing on extensive archival research to reconstruct a picture of the woman poet at work, it argued that for the female experimental poet in the 20th century, the compositional site — namely the workroom that the poet occupied — functioned as a critical foundation for the evolution of her poetics. In attending to the particulars of Niedecker’s rural cabin, Guest’s artistic studio and Howe’s historical archives, Claire’s research considered the intersections between lived, imagined, and textual spaces.  

Claire’s next major research project, ‘The Poetics of Grime’, will consider the poetic and the political space of Grime music in the 21st century. It identifies this emergent sub-culture as a significant voice in oppositional urban politics, and positions Grime as the first legitimate post-millennium avant-garde invocation in the UK.
Claire is also co-founder of ‘Radical Pedagogies: The Humanities Teaching Network’. The inaugural 2-day conference was held in January 2018, bringing together Lecturers, Educational Professionals and PhD students from across the country to discuss innovative pedagogy in HE. It was awarded £4,500 by the Student Projects Grant Scheme at Kent. Find more information at: www.radicalpedagogies.com 

• Elected Early Career Representative on the Executive Committee for University English, 2014-2019. http://www.universityenglish.ac.uk/ 
  
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 
  
• University College Union (UCU) Anti-casualisation Representative, University of Kent 2017-2019. 
  
• UCU Anti-casualisation National Committee member, 2018-2019.