Dr Katie Harling-Lee (BA (Hons), MA, PhD, AFHEA)

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Contact details

Address

Street

School of Divinity
New College
Mound Place

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH1 2LX

Biography

Background

I joined the School of Divinity in September 2025 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, working on the project ‘Quiet Literary Listening: Quaker Silence in the Novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’, after working as an Early Career Teaching Fellow in English Literature in the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures here at Edinburgh (January-August 2025). While broadly based in Modern and Contemporary Literature, my research is highly interdisciplinary, crossing into multiple areas including sound studies, musicology and music philosophy studies, conflict studies, and theology. Previously, I have taught at Durham University, Edinburgh Napier University, and Northumbria University. I completed my BA, MA, and PhD at Durham University, the latter funded by the Wolfson Foundation. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Qualifications

Ph.D. in English Literature, MA in English Literary Studies, BA in English Literature

Responsibilities & affiliations

Associate Fellow of AdvanceHE (Higher Education Academy) (AFHEA)

Research summary

My research specialism is in modern and contemporary literature, with a particular focus on literary music, sound studies, and the literary representation of armed conflict. Highly interdisciplinary in my approach, I am informed by both my formal literary analytical skills and my practical experience as a musician. A common thread in my wide academic practice is a concern with the task of ‘translating’ concepts, such as the articulation of musical experience within the ‘silent’ novel and the ethical and practical difficulties of representing armed conflict in fiction. I am currently working on a research project which proposes that listening to Quaker-influenced literary silence in the twentieth-century novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher 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 my previous PhD-related research into literary representations of music and conflict in the contemporary novel. 

Current research interests

‘Quiet Literary Listening: Quaker Silence in the Novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’ — Must silence signify the disempowering absence of voice? This British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship project explores silence in the out-of-print fiction of neglected twentieth-century author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, using archival research to consider her literary strategies for conveying silence as a source of power. I argue that Canfield Fisher’s writing was influenced by her personal experience of Quakerism, a religious practice in which communal silent worship is foundational. By analysing techniques of literary silence in her work, I ask how a Quaker perspective transforms our understanding of silence, rendering it a positive force when understood as a shared experience of attentive, embodied listening with therapeutic potential. I thereby bring necessary nuance to contemporary discussions of silence in literature and wider sonic studies, by countering the assumption that silence must always indicate suppression. In re-assessing Canfield Fisher, I revise her place in modernist scholarship, and consider the wider cultural significance of silence in the suffrage age.

Past research interests

I received my PhD (no corrections) in English Literature from Durham University in 2022, for a thesis which analysed representations of classical music in contemporary novels set during political or armed conflict. I have published previously on this topic in Violence: An International Journal and The Open Library of Humanities, and I am developing the thesis into a monograph provisionally titled 'Literary Music in Conflict: Renditions of Music and War in the Contemporary Novel', currently under review.
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