MICHAEL D. HURLEY
I am Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Cambridge, where I have worked since 2005.
As a boy, I was schooled at Stonyhurst College, a gothic pile in rural Lancashire, sometime nursery for saints as well as soldiers, and with enough flinty spirit still to light the imagination of an adolescent with a romantic turn of mind. My late father left his village school in Ireland when he was only twelve, but he loved and told powerful stories, and I inherited that love, which was spurred by an exceptional teacher at Stonyhurst, and continues to characterise my approach to literature. Whereas contemporary literary criticism is often marked by a so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ — bent on exposing what’s limited or bigoted about a given text — I believe there is more profit (and pleasure) in exploring what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called art’s ‘secret inner light’; that is, its goodness, truth, and beauty.
After school, I followed a decently straight line through my studies, but also struck out beyond the beaten bounds of the library and the classroom. I worked for two separate years in Japan and Romania, in the latter country while it was suffering extreme hardship following the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu; and in the same period I also helped deliver aid through Croatia, in the immediate wake of its War of Independence.
As an undergraduate I read for a four year MA at St Andrews, taking Honours in English, but also studying Classics and Philosophy; playing rugby for the University was its own education. My PhD at Cambridge was on the pyrotechnical poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and when not working away at my doctorate – tumbling down the rabbit hole of prosodic theory, or so it seemed – I spent a chunk of my weekends and evenings in a barracks, and on the wind-swept Brecon Beacons, undergoing selection and training with the 21st Special Air Service Regiment, a reserve special forces unit of the army.
After my PhD, I gained a Fellowship at Cambridge, where I have stayed since, while also taking refreshing advantage of sabbatical stints abroad (with my wife and three daughters) — as a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at Harvard, for instance; and most recently, in Savannah, Georgia, helping to establish a new university, Ralston College.
My research focuses on literary style and form, and on literature’s interrelations with philosophy and theology. I was the Interdisciplinary Fellow in Philosophy at CRASSH in 2018, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in Trinity term 2021. Recent books include a study of religious poets from William Blake to T. S. Eliot, a revaluation of the genius of G. K. Chesterton, and an introduction to Poetic Form. A list of my academic writings can be found here.
Above all, my scholarly interests are directed towards ultimate questions and questions of value; and in this vein, I also frequently write, give talks and public lectures for a non-academic audience, on the great ideas and works of art and literature that shape the way we understand ourselves and the world.
I am a Trustee of The Christian Heritage Centre, believing passionately in the importance of remembering and recovering, as well as critically engaging, ‘the fine things that were thought and done by our forebears’.
I can be contacted by email: mdh32@cam.ac.uk
