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, and I co-convene the Midlands Romantic Seminar with Dr Paul Whickman. I am a member of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Research Cluster.

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: Environmental History: Nature, Landscape and Society
• MA English: Wilderness and the Imagination

I supervise dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I welcome prospective PhD students in any of my research areas.

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)
• Keats-Shelley Association of America (K-SAA)
• 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

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 

Conference papers:

• ‘“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

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 am an organiser of the Shelley Conference in London and from 2021 to 2022 I organised 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:

• 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, 2024)
• ‘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