Dr Declan Kavanagh

Declan Kavanagh (pronouns: he/him/his) is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies with research interests in the historiography of queerness (how can we read queerness in the past?), LGBTQIA+ Studies, eighteenth-century literature and culture, disability in literature and culture (particularly physical impairment), masculinity and ‘Far-Right’ ideology, Irish literature in English, and contemporary representations and contestations of queerness in the Global North.

Education

Declan holds a First-Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History from Maynooth University, Ireland, as well as an M.Phil. in Anglo-Irish Writing (with distinction) from the University of Dublin, Trinity College. In 2013, he completed his PhD on 18th-century Literature at Maynooth University, Ireland, where he benefitted from both a John and Pat Hume Scholarship and an Irish Research Council doctoral award. 

He is the author of Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lewisburg, U.S.A: Bucknell University Press, 2017). This monograph, published in the prestigious 18th-century Studies ‘Transits Series’, is the first to consider how the discourse of effeminacy took shape across the domains of eighteenth-century political life, literary culture, and the aesthetic. It draws upon a vast range of sources, including Charles Churchill’s poetry, John Wilkes's satire, essay sheets by Tobias Smollett and Arthur Murphy, and Edmund Burke's early writings on aesthetics and politics. 

He is also contributor to, and co-editor with Jeremy Chow, of The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). This collection upholds intersectional thinking to recognise the wide currency and appeal of queer studies for a new generation of scholars, activists, students and interested allies. Its four interconnecting parts – ‘transing queer readings’, ‘reading queer ecologies’, ‘queer reading as practice’ and ‘reading queer futures’ – speak to, and help to critique and foreground, expansive queer epistemologies. Contributors evocatively explore the relationships between queerness and genders, embodiments, race, narrative, methodology, history, literature, media and art. Bringing together emerging and established queer theorists, this timely collection demonstrates how germane queer readings, theories and companions are to the livelihood of interdisciplinary research and humanistic inquiry in the 2020s.

His next monograph project explores the connections between debility, libertinism, and understandings of sexual health in the Age of Enlightenment in Britain. He is also preparing an edited volume on the queer 18th-century for De Gruyter’s 'Transnational Queer Series’.  For further information on Declan’s publications, please see below.    

Declan is a passionate and committed teacher who regards lectures and seminars as important catalysts for his own research and writing. Above all, he wants the learning spaces that he leads to be principled, challenging, and intellectually rewarding ones for everyone involved. During his teaching career so far, he has taught literature from the early modern period to the present. He offers specialist teaching in anglophone literature from 1680 to 1820; Irish literature 1700 to the present; queer studies; disability studies; critical theory (particularly gender, queer, and embodiment studies). He is pedagogically interested in the design of innovative assessments and in the uses of online spaces to further seminar learning and community building.

He is convener of ‘When Novels Were Novel: 18th-century Literature’ and ‘Queer Writing’. He contributes seminars and lectures on subjects like queer historiography or disability and literature on modules at all stages.

Declan currently supervises a creative and critical PhD project on ‘queering the British holiday’ and a CHASE Scholarship project on ‘travel and the writings of Anne Lister’. He has acted as an external examiner for MA-Research and PhD projects on libertinism, masculinity, 18th-century literature, and Alexander Pope. He is interested in supervising or examining doctoral projects on queer histories and cultures, eighteenth-century British and Irish literatures, masculinity and the ‘Far-Right’, memoir and the medical humanities. He is currently the external examiner for Winchester University’s MA in English literature.   

Since joining Kent in 2013, Declan has acted in a variety of leadership roles. He has been the Director of Kent’s Centre for Gender, Sexuality, and Writing. He has also held positions as Director of Education in English (2020-2021), Deputy-Director of Education (Divisional level: 2021-2022), and Director of Recruitment and Admissions (English and Creative Writing: 2022 to the present). He welcomes enquiries from anyone who might wish to study at Kent and he will always make time for these important and enjoyable conversations.  

Declan has also been the co-chair of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ ‘Queer and Trans caucus’ from 2016 to 2018. Since January 2020, he has acted as a committee member and accessibility officer for BSECS: the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.