Rate My Professor Stephen Kelly

Dr. Stephen Kelly serves as Senior Lecturer in English within the School of Arts, English and Languages at The Queen's University Belfast, part of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. He obtained his PhD from Queen's University Belfast in 1998. Following this, he held a lectureship at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He returned to Queen's for a post-doctoral research fellowship on the AHRC-funded Imagining History project (2003-2006), and has been Senior Lecturer since March 2006. Throughout his career, Kelly has taken on key leadership roles, including Head of English (Subject Lead) for two terms (2016-2018 and 2019-2022), Director of the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities research group on Cosmopolitanisms (2013-2014), and currently Director of Education for the School (2024-). He has served as External Examiner for undergraduate and postgraduate English programmes at the University of Huddersfield (2012-2016) and Trinity College Dublin (2023-), and was Convenor of the MA in English (Medieval Studies) from 2006 to 2012.

Kelly's scholarly interests include medieval studies, contemporary literary and cultural theory, philosophical hermeneutics, memorialising traditions, historiographical writing, digital humanities, and visual studies. He is co-investigator on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Whittington's Gift: Reconstructing the Lost Common Library of London's Guildhall (2020-2023), collaborating with Dr. Ryan Perry (University of Kent), and was previously co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ (2007-2010). His major publications feature co-edited volumes such as Imagining the Book (Brepols, 2005, with J.J. Thompson), Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life (Brepols, 2014, with Ryan Perry), and The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition (Brepols, 2013). Recent and forthcoming works include chapters like “A low murmur of provisional consent”: John Berger and translation (Routledge, 2025), and edited books Multiplicacioun of manye bookis: entangled communities, texts and manuscripts in later medieval London and beyond (Liverpool University Press, 2024) and ‘Meke reverence and devocyon’: a reader in late medieval English religious writing (Liverpool University Press, 2024). For his teaching excellence, he received the Queen's Student Union Education Award for Most Inspiring/Motivating teacher (2016) and a Queen's University Teaching Award (student-nominated category, 2019). Kelly has contributed expert commentary to BBC programmes, including "Helen Waddell: Living the Past" and "Piers the Plowman Revisited," and acts as an expert reviewer for funding councils.