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-editor of the collection, Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum (Liverpool University Press), and co-organiser of the interdisciplinary arboreal research group, the Tree Cultures Network, with Dr Anna Burton. I co-convene the Midlands Romantic Seminar with Dr Paul Whickman and I am a member of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Research Cluster.

Research interests

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

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, provisionally entitled 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.

I am co-editor of the collection, Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum (Liverpool University Press), with Dr Anna Burton. The collection considers how the arboretum, though a man-made space that groups trees formally, is also an environment in which more can be understood about the individuality of all trees on an interconnected, global scale. Grounded in the literature of the Romantic period, this project proposes that the ‘arboretum’, a term coined by John Claudius Loudon in 1838, is implicit within Romantic writers’ interest in specific trees, and culminates in 1840 with the opening of the first public arboretum, Derby Arboretum.

Recent publications

2020-Present

Books

• Anna Burton and Amanda Blake Davis, eds., Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840 (Liverpool University Press) (forthcoming)

Special issues

• Amanda Blake Davis and Anna Mercer, eds., 'Shelley Conference', special issue of Romanticism, 30.1 (2024)
• Colette Davies and Amanda Blake Davis, eds., 'Romantic Futurities', special issue of Romanticism on the Net, 76 (2021)

Book chapters

• ‘Ancient Philosophy’ in Percy Shelley in Context, ed. by Ross Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
• ‘Emily Brontë’s Shelleyan Poetics of Sexual Ambivalence’ in Romantic Women's Writing and Sexual Transgression, ed. by Kathryn Ready and David Sigler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024)

Journal articles

• ‘“—and so this tree / O that such our death may be”: Treescapes in Shelley’s Last Lyrics’, Romanticism, 30.1 (2024), 56-67 
• With Matthew Sangster, ‘“Load Every Rift”: Power, Opposition, and Community in Romantic Poetry and Heavy Metal’, European Romantic Review, 34.3 (2023), 291-302
• '"[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

Membership of professional bodies

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-UKI)
• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS)
• Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE)

Qualifications

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

Recent conferences

2020-Present

Conference organisation

• The Shelley Conference, Keats House, London, 28-29 June 2024
• British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Boundaries' Early Career and Postgraduate Conference, University of Edinburgh, 15-16 June 2023
• 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

Keynote lectures

• 'Shelley's "interfluous wood"', The Wordsworth Summer Conference, Rydal Hall, 13 August 2023

Conference papers

• '"The forest tops / Singing": Percy Bysshe Shelley's Arboreal Soundscapes', World Congress of Environmental History, University of Oulu, 22 August 2024
• '"I arise, and unbuild it again": Unmaking Percy Bysshe Shelley', British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Making and Unmaking' International Conference, University of Glasgow, 23 July 2024
• 'Shelley's Arboreal Soundscapes in "The Woodman and the Nightingale"', The Shelley Conference, Keats House, 28 June 2024
• ‘“Leaves to a tree”: Poetic Synchronicity and “Plant-Thinking” in Keats and Shelley’, Romantic Synchronicity: Literary Coincidence and the Poetics of Simultaneity, University of Tubingen, 31 August 2023
• '“The sea-blooms and the oozy woods”: Treescapes and Seascapes in Shelley’, British Association for Romantic Studies 'Romantic Boundaries' Postgraduate and Early Career Conference, University of Edinburgh, 15 June 2023
• '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

In the media

• Our Living Heritage: Landmark Trees and the Arboreal Humanities, University of Derby Blog, 24 June 2024
• #Shelley200: Mapping a Major Romantic Poet's Derbyshire Connections, University of Derby Blog, 6 July 2022

Teaching responsibilities

I teach across the BA (Hons) English programme. I lead the English cohort of the undergraduate module, 'Research in Practice', and I teach on the following postgraduate modules:

• MA History: Enlightenment: The Ferment of Ideas
• MA History: Environmental History: Nature, Landscape and Society
• MA Creative Writing: Reading Project
• MA English: The Wilderness and the Imagination

I supervise dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I am currently accepting proposals from prospective PhD students.