About

I am a Lecturer in English Literature. My research is concerned with environmental perception and writing about nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I co-lead the 'Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840' project and the interdisciplinary 'Tree Talks' seminar series with Dr Amanda Blake Davis.

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 is concerned with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and is engaged within the environmental humanities more broadly. I have a particular interest in the literary representations of trees and arboreal space, the 'Picturesque' writings of William Gilpin, the nineteenth-century novel, and nature and natural history writing.

My first monograph, Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel, was published in March 2021 with Routledge's Environmental Humanities Series. This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, ecological, geographical, and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century.

My current research project is focused on literary and cultural representations of trees, tree-planting, and arboreal caretaking in the English Lake District. Using long nineteenth-century Lakeland literature (Wordsworth, Martineau, Ruskin, and Potter) and contemporary place writing (Rebanks and Monbiot) that explores the planting, transplanting, and caretaking of trees as its focus, this is the first environmental humanities study to explore the tensions and intersections surrounding arboreal specimens and spaces in this agropastoral region. In doing so, this work responds to the pressing political and environmental need to balance tree-planting (for biodiversity and flood defences) alongside agricultural practices and traditions. As part of this research, and as a BARS/Wordsworth Trust Research Fellow for 2022, I am currently collaborating with The Wordsworth Trust on an exhibition on Wordsworthian responses to tree-planting (2023, date TBC).

I am also a co-lead on the forthcoming project 'Romantic Trees: The Literary Arboretum, 1740-1840' with my colleague, Dr Amanda Blake Davis.

Membership of professional bodies

• Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) (ASLE-UKI)
• British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS)
• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA)

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) in English, University of Liverpool
• MA in Victorian Literature, University of Liverpool
• PhD, University of Liverpool

Recent conferences

• Invited to give an online talk on '"Tree mountaineers": Tree-places, planting, and care-taking in nineteenth-century Lakeland literature' for the University of Cumbria Cultural Landscapes Series 2022 [June 2022]
• ‘The Romantic Rowan: An Ar(boreal) History’ paper given at the BSLS Conference, University of Manchester [April 2022]
• Invited to give an online ‘book talk’ on Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction for The Greenhouse: An environmental humanities research group at the University of Stavanger [September 2021]
• ‘William Gilpin, the ‘Picturesque’, and a Silvicultural Tradition’ paper given at the Land Lines Conference, University of Leeds, 2019 and at BSLS Conference, Royal Holloway, 2019
• ‘The Presence and Absence of Trees: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Green Belt’ paper given at the BSLS Winter Symposium, Cardiff University [November 2018]

Recent publications

• Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel (Routledge Environmental Humanities Series, 2021)
• Review of Matthew Hall, The Imagination of Plants: A Book of Botanical Mythology (2019) for H-Environment online initiative (in process
• ‘Remarks on Forest Scenery: North and South and the “Picturesque”’, The Gaskell Journal, 32 (2018), 37-53
• ‘Reading Stratigraphical Woodscapes in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders’, Victoriographies, 7.3 (2017), 210-223
• ‘Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders and a Silvicultural Tradition’, The Thomas Hardy Society Journal, 12.2 (2016), 56-65