Dr Laura Ludtke

Dr Laura E. Ludtke studied at the University of British Columbia (BA Hons Classical Studies) and Queen’s University, Canada (BA Hons English; MA Classics; MA English). After completing her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, she returned to Canada to take up a series of fixed-term lectureships at Queen’s University, returning to the UK in 2018.

Her research to date has focussed on intersections modernity, technology, and aesthetics in literary and cultural depictions of urban spaces. She is currently at work on a monograph, ‘Modernities, Technologies, and Aesthetics: London’s Lightscape, 1880 to 1950’, which considers a cross section of literary and cultural responses to the electrification of London that draws on original archival research into the history of that electrification. It explores the emergence of a resistance to the Enlightenment dialectic in these responses and argues for an inclusive reading of popular, genre, and middlebrow fiction alongside literary modernism in order to contextualise modernist responses to the electrification of London.

She is Secretary of the British Society for Literature and Science and chairs its annual book prize.

Along with Dr Catherine Charlwood, she has co-hosted LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast since 2019. Series 4 is coming in 2023.

Currently, as a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at Merton College, she teaches Prelims Paper 3 (‘Literature in English, 1830 to 1910’) and Paper 4 (‘Literature in English 1910 to present’). While her primary focus is transatlantic anglophone literature from 1880 to 1950, she has taught the full range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and also has extensive experience of teaching the long nineteenth century. This year, she is particularly excited to offer tutorials on the modern short story; fiction of the Harlem Renaissance; poetry of the AIDS Crisis; Blitz fiction; modernist sex, sexuality, and censorship; and anti-colonial modernisms.