Professor Gerard Kilroy
About
Gerard Kilroy is Professor of English Literature, Ignatianum University in Krakow, Senior Research Fellow, Campion Hall, Oxford, Honorary Research Fellow, University College London.
Prof. Kilroy read Classical Mods and English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and took his Ph.D. at Lancaster University.
In 2016, he was appointed Professor at the Academy Ignatianum in Krakow where, as Visiting Professor, he gave ten lectures on ‘Shakespeare in an Age of Faith’. He was a Visiting Professor for three years at Masaryk University, Brno. He has been principal consultant to a group of scholars at the Tischner and Jagiellonian Universities, Krakow, working on 'Subversive publication in Early Modern England and Poland' and on ‘Civic Education in Jesuit School Theatres of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’.
He has had Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he has done much of his research, at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and Marsh's Library, Dublin, and a Scholarship at St John's College, Oxford. He was a Grocers’ Company Scholar from 2001–2014.
His main research interests are in the transmission and circulation of manuscripts, the survival of religious ideas in the works of Shakespeare, and in the central role of an oral culture of sermons and disputations in early modern England.
He founded the Café Philo in Bath in 1997, which now takes place in the Bath Royal Scientific and Literary Institute.
Monographs
Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015; 2nd edn, Routledge, 2017).
The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009).
Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2005).
Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion, ed. (Oxford: University Press, 2022).
Shared authorship
“The Early English Jesuit Mission: Lingering Doubts”, in Jesuits in Britain: Four Hundred Years, ed.Thomas M. McCoog, SJ (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2025).
‘Wrapped in deceit: book-smuggling from Rouen in 1584’, in The Elizabethan Catholic Underground: Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation, eds Earle Havens and Mark Rankin (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2025).
‘Some Terrible Dream: Pole’s Legacy to Harpsfield and Sander’, in Reformation Cardinal: Reginald Pole in Sixteenth-Century Italy and England, ed. James Willoughby (Oxford: New College, 2023).
‘Metropolitan Terror in The Secret Agent: Truth and Fiction in a Surreal Drama’, in Conrad Without Borders: Trancultural and Transtextual Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
‘Romeo and Juliet: Pilgrims and Paradise in the Hortus Conclusus’, in Christian Shakespeare: Question Mark, A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in his Christian Context, ed. Michael Scott and Michael Collins (Georgetown University Press, 2022).
‘ “Negative Capability”, Keats Informing the Existince of Shakespeare’, in New Perspectives on Romantic Interactions, ed. Ania Pachulowska-Messing and Monika Coghen (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press with Columbia University Press, 2021).
‘ “To wyn yow to heaven”: Edmund Campion’s winning words’, in Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789: “The World is Our House”?, ed. James E. Kelly and Hannah Thomas (Brill, 2019).
‘Sacred Speech: Saying the Word’, in Moral Upbringing through the Arts and Literature, ed. Paweł Kaźmierczak and Jolanta Rzegocka (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).
‘Shakespeare and the Archaeology of Culture’, in Colossus: How Shakespeare still bestrides the cultural and literary world, ed. Sylwia J. Wojciechowska and Aeddan Shaw (Krakow: Ignatianum, 2018).
‘Solidarity and the Dignity of the Human Person’, in In Freedom, In Solidarity: Civil Resistance in Poland and the Philippines, 1980–1990, ed. Clarinda Calma (Krakow–Manila: Kultura i Politika, 2016).
‘Edmund Campion’s Rationes Decem: A Cosmopolitan Book’, in Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ed. Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma, Jolanta Rzegocka (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016).
‘A Tangled Chronicle: The Struggle over the Memory of Edmund Campion’, in Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England, ed. Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (Farnham and Burlington VT: Ashgate, September 2013).
‘Edmund Campion in the shadow of Paul’s Cross: the Culture of Disputation’, in Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, ed. Torrance Kirby, P. G. Stanwood (Montreal: Brill, 2014).
‘Sir John Harington’s Protesting Catholic Gifts’, in The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations, ed. Jean-Christophe Mayer (Montpellier: Université Paul Valery, 2004), pp. 217-41; Downside Review, 426 (January 2004), 19-42.
‘Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet’, in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, eds R. Dutton, A. Findlay and R. Wilson (Manchester: University Press, 2003), pp. 143-60.
Recent Articles
‘Commotion time’ (the destruction under Edward VI), The Tablet, 25 February 2025.
‘Los caballerescos jesuitas ingleses (1580–1606)’, in Manresa, vol. 96 (2024) pp. 235-246.
‘Writing in the Sand’ (Seamus Heaney and poetry in time of conflict), The Tablet, 19/26 August 2023.
‘Oxford’s Lost College”, The Tablet, 15 October 2022’
‘A Catholic family and its Legacy’ (the recusant roots of John Maynard Keynes), The Tablet, 14 December 2019.
‘The Secret Agent: a far from Simple Tale’, forthcoming in the Yearbook of Conrad Studies, vol. 13 (2018), pp. 55-64.
‘The Stones of Brideshead: The Church in Metaphor’, The Tablet (13 June 2020), 12-13.
‘A household under fire: two different books, Edmund Campion and Brideshead Revisited intertwined in language, theology and publishing history’, The Tablet (8 June 2019) 12–13.
‘Herbert’s “Elegy of Fortinbras’ and Political Power in Hamlet’ in Perspektywy Kultury, 14 (1/2016), 7–15.
‘“Paths Coincident”: The Parallel Lives of Dr Nicholas Sander and Edmund Campion, S.J.’, in Journal of Jesuit Studies 1 (2014), 520–41.
‘The Queen’s Visit to Oxford in 1566: A Fresh Look at Neglected Manuscript Sources’, Recusant History, 31.3 (2013), 331–373.
‘Advertising the Reader: Sir John Harington’s “directions in the margent”’, English Literary Renaissance , vol. 41.1 (February, 2011), 64-110 (awarded ELR prize).
‘Sir Thomas Tresham: his Emblem’, in Emblematica, 17, July 2009, 149-79.
‘Scribal Coincidences: Campion, Byrd, Harington and the Sidney Circle’, in Sidney Journal, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb, 22, Spring, 2004, 73-88.
‘Within these Walls: ‘The Secret World of Sir Thomas Tresham’, in L’Interiorité au Temps de la Renaissance, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies, Actes de colloque de Paris, 2003-2004 (Paris: Champion, 2005), 103-42.
‘Campion’s Virgilian Epic’, Culture: Collections, Compilations, Actes de la Societé Internationale de Récherches Interdisciplinaires sur la Renaissance, ed. M.-T. Jones-Davies (Paris: Champion, 2005), 170-93.
‘Paper, inke and penne: The Literary memoria of the Recusant Community’, Downside Review, 415 (April, 2001), 95-124, and Memoire et Oubli au Temps de la Renaissance, ed. M. T. Jones-Davies, Actes de la Societé Internationale de Récherches Interdisciplinaires sur la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2002), 45-78.
‘Eternal Glory: Campion’s Virgilian Epic’, ‘Commentary’, TLS, 8 March 2002, 13-15.
Jesuit Online Journal: Thinking Faith
Evelyn Waugh’s Edmund Campion: ‘Walking at our elbow’, Thinking Faith, 28 November 2017.
Shakespeare: “The Undiscovered Country”, Thinking Faith, 21 April 2016.
“Faith: the substance of things to be hoped for”: Vespers at Hampton Court Palace, Thinking Faith, 17th February 2016.
'Edmundus Campianus Oxoniensis', Thinking Faith, 30 November 2011.
Earlier articles
‘The Dido Episode and the Sixty-fourth Poem of Catullus’, Symbolae Osloenses, 44 (1969), 48-60.
‘Ironic Balance in Persuasion’, Downside Review, vol. 325 (1978), 305-13.
‘Mansfield Park in Two Volumes’, English, vol. 34 (1985), 115-29.
‘Palladian Symmetry in Sense and Sensibility’, Transactions (Midlands Jane Austen Society, 1993).