Katie is a Fulbright scholar and one of the UK’s foremost academics on spoken word poetry.
In 2020 she completed her PhD in English at the University of Strathclyde, ‘The Performance and Perception of Authenticity in Contemporary UK Spoken Word Poetry.’ Her doctoral research interrogated the function of ‘authencity’ as a criterion for aesthetic and ethical quality within the genre of spoken word poetry. It proposed a genre-specific taxonomy of 10 strains of ‘authenticity’ commonly performed, framed, and perceived in spoken word poetry. As part of this research, Katie carried out in-depth interviews with 70 UK-based poets and producers in 2017. Learn more about this PhD here. Katie summarised this research in a chapter published in the groundbreaking text ‘Spoken Word in the UK’ (Routledge, 2021).
Katie also has an academic focus on themes of identity and nationhood within contemporary Scottish poetics. Her 2014 Bates College English thesis “Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie” can be read here. As a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Strathclyde, she wrote her MRes on “Narratives of Scottish History and Identity in Pro-Independence Poetry Written for the 2014 Referendum” (2015). She co-organised the conference Poetic Politics: Culture and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, One Year On at the National Library of Scotland in September 2015. In 2016 she co-edited the anthology ‘Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry’ (Luath Press), which gathered contemporary poetry reflecting the tumultuous, rapidly evolving nature of Scottish politics.
As a feminist, Katie is keenly interested in gender inequalities in systems of power, including academia and the arts. She wrote the foreword to Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories (Palgrave, 2020) and is featured in ‘Feminism in Our Times: Crises, Connections & Cares’ (University of Strathclyde, 2020). In 2017 she delivered an hour-long performance talk critiquing contemporary performance poetry through a feminist lens at the Feminist & Women’s Studies Association Biennial Conference ‘Making Space for feminism in the neo-liberal academy.’
Katie has presented her research at conferences across the UK. Read Katie’s full academic CV here.
Katie discusses her research into contemporary U.K. spoken word poetry in this episode of the Loudcast:
Katie Ailes 