Oxford English Literature Professor Kate McLoughlin looks back over 12 centuries of English literature to uncover the power and possibilities of silence.

Her talk (9th April) ranges from exile on icy seas described in Anglo Saxon poems to searches for silence in the modern age of pings. She includes blissful unions with the divine and the natural world, the hushes of intimacy, literary epics of grief, the failure of words in the face of war and silence as a form of protest. McLoughlin explores the ways in which authors create silence through words, including silence in Shakespeare and the work of medieval lyricists, who expressed complex theological notions through lullabies.

Kate McLoughlin is a professor in English literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790–2015 and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing.

This event is a co-operation between the Centre for British Studies and the University of Oxford.