Dr Kyle Leyden

Kyle Leyden’s research focuses on the contextualisation of buildings and urban topologies within the contemporaneous milieu of political activity, philosophical thought, artistic taste and foreign influence, and explores the ways in which this can transform orthodox historic narratives and challenge contemporary attitudes.

His work aims to apply the broadest range of cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological approaches to the study of the built environment in order to understand its meaning and message, in addition to its active agency – past and present – in political discourse and in constructing and sustaining narratives of place, identity and belonging. He is particularly concerned with the construction of national identities in the long eighteenth century, and exploring approaches and attitudes to the material legacies of empire in postcolonial societies. His work places emphasis on the way buildings were intended to be experienced as cultural objects by contemporary and later societies, stressing the theoretical importance of agency and lived experience.

Recent work on the agency of the built environment in the construction of Irish national identities in the early modern period has uncovered critical intersections between antiquarianism and the identity of the Irish landed elites which has continued resonances in contemporary discourse on Irish identity. This work has revealed how the complex web of semiotic indicators gained from the retention of the old negotiated and communicated an ideal of stable identity during periods when personal and national self-fashioning by the self or others was distinctly unstable. He is especially interested in exploring the appropriation of antiquities within built landscapes outside their archaeological or antiquarian context, and placing them instead into a semiotic relationship with later architectural developments.

Following a career at the Bar in the Irish and Northern Irish jurisdictions, Kyle joined the Courtauld in 2023 after completing and M.A. and doctorate in architectural history at the Institute. Past teaching experience has included roles within Trinity College, Dublin; the University of Notre Dame in England; and UCL. A current member of the Historic Buildings Council of Northern Ireland, he has worked for many years as a researcher and advisor to many of the major heritage bodies of the UK and Ireland, including carrying out in-depth research into the Somerset House site on behalf of the Courtauld Connects Project and Somerset House Trust. Most recently, he carried out research and editorial work on Mark Girouard’s Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture 1540-1640 on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre, working closely with the author on his last major architectural work, and is currently in the process of completing work on Hamish Miles’ catalogue raisonné of the works of David Wilkie in conjunction with art historian Alex Kidson.