“It can change the way you think…” A Fellow Perspective: Kirsten Shepherd

In the first of a new series, A Fellow Perspective, we speak to Kirsten Shepherd, Fellow in English at St Catz and Professor of English and Theatre Studies.

We’re sitting in the vast glass atrium of the Schwarzman Centre, Oxford’s newest home for the Humanities. It feels like exactly the right place to talk about reading, and about how ideas move between disciplines, people and the wider world.

Kirsten’s research focuses on theatre, but rarely in isolation. She’s drawn to the points where theatre intersects with wider intellectual and cultural shifts – science, evolution, climate change, modernism. Again and again, her work asks the same underlying question: how do ideas move? How do they find new forms? And what happens when they do?

That same instinct, to cross boundaries rather than remain within them, shapes how she approaches research itself. Much of her work sits between disciplines, bringing together literature, science, performance and cultural history. Collaboration, she says, has become central to how she thinks. Working with theatre-makers, translators and fellow scholars doesn’t just communicate research, it changes it. “You get questions you hadn’t thought of,” she says. “It cracks something open.”

“It’s life-giving… it replenishes you…”

Alongside that academic work sits something more personal: a lifelong relationship with reading itself. “It’s life-giving,” she says. “It replenishes you. Even if you only have three minutes, it’s still a brilliant thing to be doing in the three minutes.”

That belief led to LitHits, a project she founded in 2018 at a time when much of the conversation around reading had turned anxious. The narrative was familiar: phones replacing books, attention spans shrinking, deep reading under threat. Kirsten never quite accepted that version of events. Instead, she saw reading adapting and changing shape. Continuing in ways that perhaps weren’t always recognised. “We’re reading hypertextually all the time,” she says. “You read something, then you look something up, then that takes you somewhere else.”

LitHits was designed to work with that reality with short, carefully chosen extracts that could be encountered in the spaces between everything else. The name captures the idea perfectly. “It’s a hit right to the bloodstream,” she says. Not something to file away for later, but something immediate, a jolt.

What surprised her most was the response. Readers wrote back, conversations began, and people suggested pieces and became guest curators. What started as a simple idea became something shared, built on trust, curiosity, and the quiet persistence of reading in people’s lives.

That same instinct, to recover voices and create new conversations, runs through her most recent academic work. Kirsten has led a landmark Oxford World’s Classics volume bringing together Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken with Men of Honour, written by Laura Kieler, the real woman whose life inspired Ibsen’s Nora, and whose own play has never before been published in English. For decades, Kieler’s story existed mainly as a footnote to Ibsen’s. Now, her words sit alongside his. “She would never have imagined it,” Kirsten says.

The project doesn’t stop at publication. A new theatre production, Burning Down the House, developed with Breach Theatre, will bring Kieler’s story to the stage, in a play that blends her drama with her life and puts her at the centre.

“Whether you’re reading data, reading DNA, or reading a novel… you’re reading.”

At Catz, Kirsten sees that same spirit of exchange everywhere. The College’s interdisciplinary life isn’t something abstract, but something lived, conversations across subjects, perspectives shared over meals, and ideas moving freely between fields. “Whether you’re reading data, reading DNA, or reading a novel,” she says, “you’re reading.”

She also talks about the physical environment itself. The open, modernist layout of Catz. The way students and fellows share space. The ease with which conversations begin. Over time, she’s come to understand how much that environment shapes the way people think and work. When asked how Catz had changed her, “It changes how you thrive,” she says.

Back in the Schwarzman Centre, the flow of people continues around us. Students and staff move between lectures and conversations pick up and fall away. For all the noise about distraction, Kirsten remains quietly optimistic. Reading hasn’t disappeared. It has adapted, as it always has. She watches the movement around her for a moment, then shrugs lightly. “It honestly can change the way you think,” she says.

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You can sign up to LitHits here.

Find out more about Professor Shepherd here.

Want to nominate someone for A Fellow Perspective? Or would like to feature yourself? Send your suggestions to collegecomms@stcatz.ox.ac.uk.