DeclanKavanagh.bsky.social

@drdeclankavanagh.bsky.social

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Senior Lecturer in 18th-century Studies (Queer & Disability Studies). Author of *Effeminate Years* (2017); co-editor of *The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading* (2025). Views my own, not employer’s.

'A picture presented to all our Senses': Vision in Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Michael Clancy's Memoirs (1750) DECLAN KAVANAGH
Picture of a draft of my article on disability and queer fiction with some words crossed out
Drawing of St James’ Gate Dublin
Lady in Riding Habit for Donna Landry "Charm'd into love of what obscures my fame, If I had wit, I'd celebrate her name" A Lady in riding habit Walks to the bagnio Leaving behind The long dust road. In morning shade Under sweetgum Her white Rahvan Whickering softly. Before vanishing She lightens Her true pocket To the wind: Papers, snuff, Gold sewn invisible. This eidolon a printed sign: Spoken and sublime. Then, suddenly distant Echoes elsewhere. Delicate hyacinthus Orientalis scents air. A lingering gone To seed sweetness. In this wake, effendi record a scattering Of wild gifts. Flowering In hearts and minds. A sisterly prayer Good might grow On silken trails She will not know. By Declan Kavanagh
It was very friendly and accessible - I didn't feel pressured to share or participate in discussions but | still felt invited to. There was plenty of time to write in a guided way and to look at interesting archival objects I wouldn't otherwise have seen, and it was well-paced and structured. I enjoyed the range of prompts and the way Declan gave the perfect amount of direction and support but also space for ideas to germinate. I really appreciated the helpful feedback. It was also a lovely group size that allowed for the sharing of ideas and a sense of honesty and intimacy in sharing. Lovely open facilitator and supportive group
PowerPoint on two screens with table and archival materials below
Paper that reads: HIGHLY COMMENDED ACADEMIC ADVISING AWARD This award is presented to: DECLAN KAVANAGH in recognition of being Highly Commended for outstanding Academic Advising and their valued contribution to supporting student success. Dr William Collier Deputy Director of Student Life 17th June 2026
Two cups: teaching excellence and outstanding academic advisor
The Japanese ambassador to the U.K. Hiroshi Suzuki pictured enjoying his recent trip to Folkestone - pictured with a giant seagull in a seagull pose.
Panellists at the event including Wadie Said (Edward Said’s son).
Nostalgia and Place: WRITING THE UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT 60 A creative writing workshop on the theme of nostalgia and place led by Dr Declan Kavanagh (School of Humanities) and hosted by the Special Collections and Archives, Templeman Library. Are you a Kent alumnus who writes creatively or would like some dedicated time to do so in a supportive environment? Are you interested in the history of the University, its Canterbury campus and wider cultural life? Join us for a bespoke creative-writing workshop (and archival treasure hunt) on Friday 19th of June at 3pm in the cosy reading room of Kent's Special Collections & Archives. WHAT TO EXPECT: We will explore some items from the University's 60-year archive (photographs; documents; ephemera and other treasures). We will gently start to think about how these artefacts can help us tease out the connections between memory and place. There will then be some opportunities to free write using the archival materials as prompts. The workshop will conclude with reflections on what participants have written in whatever way feels most comfortable for them (sharing their work or sharing how it felt writing it or not sharing anything at all). Kent WE ARE KENT PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE A Diamond Weekend Places are limited to allow for meaningful workshopping and due to room capacity. For additional information please contact Dr Declan Kavanagh: D.kavanagh@kent.ac.uk
It started raining just as the PM left - perhaps symbolic of the leadership crisis he is currently facing.
"As discouraging as a breakfast of cold porridge." Collected Poems, by W.B. Yeats (1896)
Coffee cup on window sill with cat ornament and ghost bin. Cathedral towers in the hazy distance.
Hokum poster
Tower Bridge
Laptop with a slide about ‘recording blindness’ picturing text and some cassette tapes.
Light display in Darwin College University of Kent - stunning brutalist interior.
Picture of Canterbury cathedral in the sun - my home office view
A child with a hot cross bun stuffed in his mouth
Lives and Adventures 2 Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel DECLAN KAVANAGH If novels by and about women in the eighteenth century initiate a new literary form for the exploration of interiority, the opposite case might be made for many of the novels by and about Irish men. The long-held belief that the eighteenth century inaugurated a new language of interiority or subjectivity associated with the joint rise of empiricism and the novel has been challenged by scholars such as Jonathan Kramnick who argue that for many writers in the period, the 'ostensible privacy or interiority of mental states is often not at issue' in their writing.' More particularly, the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a 'gentleman' were dangerously unfixed, seemingly produce literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque. One of the best known such works by an Irish writer (if not actually set in Ireland) is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67); unique as it might appear, it sits in a context of other works by Irish writers of the period.* Novels by Anglo-Irish men in the eighteenth century, more often than not, disrupted the very project of bourgeois masculinity that the new literary form of the English novel promulgated as the century progressed." Any survey of Irish men and the novel in eighteenth-century Ireland must thus begin by qualifying what is meant by Irish' and what is meant by 'the novel'. The designations of 'Irish' or "Anglo-Irish' have a contested history both in the historical context of eighteenth-century Ireland and in its ancillary scholarly field of Irish eighteenth-century studies. As James Ward articulates in his essay Irish and Anglo-Irish Writing' (2024):
Police/ road closed / van
Picture that says QUEER JOY IS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE Colours are pink and green my blue
Star Trek figures on a widow sill
A man with long red hair standing with a woman with dark hair
Two swans on a river
A TNG era shuttlecraft on my windowsill
Sticker of the late Catherine O’Hara in role as Moira Rose: reads ‘why must you be so constantly irksome’
Desk view with window / cathedral in frame / grey sort of day
Tabby cat sitting on a green chair with bird of paradise behind.
Maureen Boyle ST BRIGID IN THE ORCHARD My favourite story of you takes place in an orchard. To begin, I imagine it as spring - grass wet underfoot, the air coloured in blossom. But now, I think it is winter, the sharp days around your feast day, the old trees gnarled in the wet, the nascent buds whorled and hidden. And there you come upon a young woman who is tortured by what has seeded in her without her choosing - an intimate anguish that has her almost inarticulate with fear. You are our Pomona, concerned not with fruit but with flourishing knowing that not all grafts take, that seeding is not the best way to make a new tree, that the canopy must be opened. And so, you gift her, her peace. The chronicle tells us you, 'Made the child disappear with no pain', meaning that when the spring comes, she will blossom into herself again.
Picture shows a lit up Canterbury cathedral against an inky black sky
A door into the dark of a shed with a bare floor save some odd bits of wood and cans of paint just out of view.
Lecture hall with three speakers at a desk
Auditorium with audience and podium, speaker and projection.
A supermarket trolley with boxes moving slowly across a college lawn
Four brown boxes containing programmes - they look heavy and they are.
College lawn with a very light dusting of snow
Entrance to Pembroke College - stone walls, oak door, open to a vista with a manicured lawn.
Headline from BBC: Starmer won't be drawn on whether US strikes on Venezuela broke international law - picture of Starmer
Fitzgerald 16th castle at Maynooth (once the capital of Ireland or the Pale at the very least)
Bright neon shoes on pavement
Family in a black and white Christmas scene
Profile of man’s face with scissor hands
Two women in 1950s dress look askance one holding a camera in separate portrait shots.
LA sunset - two women in silhouette
Poster for Pillion with main characters in motorcycle leathers by a motorbike
Visitation Sunday He took me to Knowth and Dowth, to visit the dead we had forgot. Buried in chambers, in vanished splendor: carefully wrapped secrets scenting their sweet repose. We dreamed them in their wintery necropolis: mouths gaping, pupils dilated waiting in ecstasy as cold mathematics turned golden the sunlit passage honeying flesh. That solstice I crawled into another man's silence needing to bless or be blessed. Circling a cruciform ritual of absence. This is another fantasy — This is another history. When ancients seemed closer on a rare visitation Sunday cautiously driving to kill time: 'Knowth to do, Knowth to do' His little joke, his little love, buried in Dowth. Declan Kavanagh
I ASKED SANTA FOR A RESEARCH GRANT. YOU STILL BELIEVE IN RESEARCH GRANTS?
Symphony Orchestra &Chorus GHOST STORIES AND MUSIC FOR CHRISTMAS Sunday 14 December 2025 barbican Associate Orchestra RADIO E SOUNDS
A coffee on a train platform - behind the yellow line.
Old woman saying: I wasn't trying to be nice. I was trying to be accurate.
A tasteful wreath - hard to imagine I know given the horrid wreaths these days. Small, with pine cones, and white berries.
A little tree with colourful lights and decorations that include a peanut butter jar, Newbridge silverware & some gay rainbows for some reason
Literary critics, creative writers, a table full of cake…
Sumup this module in one word... thought-provoking intersectional welcoming amazingly-insightful helpful adventure emotional human queer
Red ribbon pin on a denim Carhartt shirt