About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow 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 working on my first monograph, Shelley and Androgyny, along with a project on Shelley and trees.

Teaching responsibilities

1st Year: Mutants & Monsters: Interpreting Fantasy

3rd Year: Eighteenth-Century Literature: Terror, Wit and Letters of Love

MA: Enlightenment: Ferment of Ideas

MA: Environmental History: Nature, Landscape and Society

Research interests

My primary research interests are in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture; 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; gender studies; Irish 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.

My current project is on trees in Romantic poetry. My project engages with object-oriented ontology and ecocriticism to propose ecological readings of Blake and Shelley among others, with particular emphasis on intermedial forms and visual, material, and verbal connections.

Membership of professional bodies

• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• The English Association (EA)
• Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA)
• Keats-Shelley Memorial Association (K-SMA)
• Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society (RHS)
• 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:

• 'Mysticism and Misdirection in Alastor and Peter Bell the Third', Wordsworth Summer Conference, 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 have served as a Postgraduate Representative for the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) since 2019, and I also serve on the BARS Digital Events Committee. Prior to this, I served as a Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA).

I am an organiser of the 2022 Shelley Conference and I also co-organise an ongoing series of Shelley200 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.

Recent publications

2020-Present

Special issues:

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

Journal articles and book chapters:

•  '"[L]ife among the dead": Translation and Shelley's "On a Future State"', 'Romantic Futurities', special issue of Romanticism on the Net (forthcoming)
• 'Emily Brontë's Shelleyan Poetics of Sexual Ambivalence', Romantic Women Writers and Sexual Transgression, ed. by Kathryn Ready and David Sigler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming)
• '"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:

•  Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry's On Abstinence by Cecilia Muratori (London: Legenda, 2020), Coleridge Bulletin, 57 (2021), 141-145