About

I am a Lecturer in English Literature. My research focuses on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture, with particular emphasis on Romantic poetry. I am especially interested in Percy Bysshe Shelley, and I am currently preparing my first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny, alongside a project provisionally entitled Shelley's Trees: Intermedial Ecologies. I am co-organiser of the interdisciplinary arboreal research group, Tree Talks, with Dr Anna Burton.

Teaching responsibilities

• First Year: Mutants and Monsters: Interpreting Fantasy
• Third Year: Eighteenth-Century Literature: Terror, Wit and Letters of Love
• MA: Enlightenment: Ferment of Ideas
• MA: Environmental History: Nature, Landscape and Society
• MA: Wilderness and the Imagination

Research interests

My primary research interests are in Romanticism; poetry and poetics; form; aesthetics; classical reception; and influence and allusion. I have additional research interests in material culture; visual culture; print culture; manuscript studies; vegan studies; metal studies; and the environmental humanities.

I am currently preparing my first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny. My monograph analyses androgyny as a psychic merger in Shelley's poetry alongside his readings and translation of Plato's Symposium, with attention to Plato's implication of the reader as an interlocutor.

I began my current project, Shelley's Trees: Intermedial Ecologies, as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature in 2021. This project explores drawings of trees in Shelley's manuscripts through what I term the poet's 'intermedial ecology', where manuscripts foster an environment of visual and textual interrelations.

Membership of professional bodies

• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• The Charles Lamb Society
• The English Association (EA)
• Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA)
• Keats-Shelley Memorial Association (K-SMA)
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE)

Qualifications

• BA, Christopher Newport University
• MA, Queen's University Belfast
• PhD, University of Sheffield

Recent conferences

2019-Present

Conference organisation:

• The Shelley Conference, Keats House, London, 8-9 July 2022 
• British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Disconnections/Reconnections' International Online Conference, 12-13 & 19-20 August 2021
• British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Futurities' Early Career and Postgraduate Conference, Keats House, London (held online), 11-13 June 2020 
• New Directions in Nineteenth-Century Periodical Studies Conference, University of Leeds, 19-20 September 2019

Conference papers:

• 'Shelley and the Mycelian Imagination', British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism 'New Romanticisms' International Conference, Edge Hill University, 4 August 2022
• '"Heavy Matter": Sound, Poetics, and Metal's Romantic Legacy', British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism 'New Romanticisms' International Conference, Edge Hill University, 4 August 2022
• '"--and so this tree--/O that such our death may be--": Treescapes in Shelley's Last Lyrics', The Shelley Conference, Keats House, 8 July 2022
• 'Norwegian Wood: Percy Bysshe Shelley's Pines', British Romanticism and Europe Conference, Ascona, Switzerland, 25 June 2022
• 'Mysticism and Misdirection in Alastor and Peter Bell the Third', Wordsworth Summer Conference, Rydal Hall, 15 August 2019
• 'The Fantasy of Androgyny in Shelley's The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion', British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Facts and Fantasies' International Conference, University of Nottingham, 28 July 2019

Additional interests and activities

I am the Early Career Representative for the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), having previously served as a Postgraduate Representative since 2019. Prior to this, I served as a Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA) from 2018-2019.

I co-organised the 2022 Shelley Conference in London and a series of #Shelley200 digital events and initiatives to commemorate the bicentenary of the poet's death in 1822.

I am a contributor to the 'Literature 1780-1830: The Romantic Period, General and Prose' section of The Year's Work in English Studies.

In the media

#Shelley200: Mapping a Major Romantic Poet's Derbyshire Connections, University of Derby Blog, 6 July 2022

Recent publications

2020-Present

Special issues:

• Colette Davies and Amanda Blake Davis, eds., 'Romantic Futurities', special issue of Romanticism on the Net, 76 (2021)

Journal articles:

•  '"[L]ife among the dead": Translation and Shelley's "On a Future State"', 'Romantic Futurities', special issue of Romanticism on the Net, 76 (2021)
• '"Ephemeral are gay gulps of laughter": P. B. Shelley, Louis MacNeice, and the Ambivalence of Laughter', English: Journal of the English Association, Essay Prize, 70.268 (2021), 23-46 
• 'Androgyny as Mental Revolution in Act 4 of Prometheus Unbound', Keats-Shelley Review, 34.2 (2020), 160-177

Reviews:

• The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume VII edited by Nora Crook, general editors Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Keats-Shelley Review, 36.1 (2022), 44-47
• Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry's On Abstinence by Cecilia Muratori (London: Legenda, 2020), Coleridge Bulletin, 57 (2021), 141-145