Dr Katie Harling-Lee is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2025-28) based at the School of Divinity. She is working on a research project titled ‘Quiet Literary Listening: Quaker Silence in the Novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’ which proposes that listening to the Quaker-influenced literary silence in Canfield Fisher’s novels offers new insights into how silence can be creatively perceived as a positive force both within literature and wider society. This research into literary silence builds on her previous PhD-related research into literary representations of music and conflict in the contemporary novel, which she is developing into a monograph provisionally titled Literary Music in Conflict: Renditions of Music and War in the Contemporary Novel.
While broadly based in Modern and Contemporary Literature, her research is highly interdisciplinary, crossing into multiple areas including sound studies, musicology and music philosophy studies, conflict studies, and theology. Before joining the Divinity School, she taught in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at Edinburgh University, having previously worked at Edinburgh Napier University, Durham University, and Northumbria University. She has published earlier work in Violence: An International Journal and The Open Library of Humanities.