Postgraduate research students

The speaker of Charlotte Smith’s ‘Elegy’ hails “Despair, and Death, and Desolation” – it is the sea that answers the call. My project will examine how Romantic/Victorian Gothic women authors utilised oceanic images and littoral settings to explore the concept of death in an age where the undersea was as inscrutable as the afterlife. Tracing this nautical strand back into the pre-Gothic “Graveyard School” of morbid poetry, I will argue that the sea is part of the Gothic mode from its very beginnings, creating a ripple effect of shared and inherited language across generations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts.

Current research interests include:

• Gothic literature
• 18th & 19th century women's writing
• Blue Humanities
• EcoGothic
• Folklore

• Professor Dahlia Porter
• Dr Alexandra Campbell

External supervisors

• Prof. Tom E. Jones (University of St Andrews)

• Carnegie PhD Scholarship

• ‘Using Archival Material in Research’, DECADOCS Summer School: Working in Archives, 7 Sept 2026. (Invited.)
• Anne Bannerman in ‘Romantic Poets: Off the Beaten Track’ Panel, BARS, July 2026.
• ‘There’s Method in Our Metaphors: The Role of Figurative Waters in the Victorian Imaginary’, DACH Victorianists Terraqueous Victorians Workshop, 26 June 2026.
• Careers in Heritage and Publishing, University of St Andrews, 26 May 2026. (Invited.)
• Haunted Shores Network Research Showcase, 20 May 2026. (Invited.)
• ‘Unbroken groans and broken tales: acoustic erosion of Bannerman and Corelli’s coastal Gothic stories,’Unquiet Shores Conference, in-person, Edinburgh Napier, 20 June 2025. 
• Chairing ‘Experimental Films’ panel, Unquiet Shores Conference, hybrid, Edinburgh Napier, 18 June 2025. 
• ‘Flashtalk: Pre-honours Feedback Sheet 2A/B’, School of Critical Studies Diversity in Feedback and Assessment Workshop, University of Glasgow, 19 March 2025.
• Chairing ‘Romantic Coastal Gothic Poetry Session’, Haunted Shores Reading Group, 24 October 2024.
• ‘Shores, Streams, and the Beyond in Romantic & Victorian Gothic’, ESTUARY: A Harbour for Salt and Fresh Water Studies Inaugural Symposium, Online, Sept 2024.
• ‘“I was absorbed in the woman herself”: Watery Transitions & Transformations in Bannerman and Corelli’, IGA Halifax, in-person, July-Aug 2024.
• ‘‘Visionary vales’ and ‘vast concussion’: Writing Terror into the Terrain from Landscape Gardens to ‘Beachy Head’’, BARS Glasgow, in-person, July 2024. 
• 'Styx and stones: submarine spaces and illusory drowning in garden grottoes’, Haunted Shores IV, Online, June 2024.
• ‘Death, Doubling, and Delusion at the Water’s Edge in Corellian Short Fiction’, Commemorating Corelli: A Centenary Conference, Hybrid, May 2024.
• ‘Not-so-super, Natural Monsters: Anne Bannerman and Mary Robinson’s Agential Landscapes’, BARS Digital Event: Gothic Monstrosity and Romanticism Roundtable, Online, April 2024.
• ‘Keeping your ghosts (and coasts) to yourself: telling tales of littoral spectres in Bannerman and Corelli’, Scottish Shores Seminar, Edinburgh Napier University, May 2023. (Invited)
• '"The unusual accident of falling upwards": The Not-so-hidden Depths of Sea Creatures in Victorian Periodicals", Aquatic Surfaces and Depths Conference, Haunted Shores Research Network, 3-8 April 2023.
  
• ‘“On ocean and earth I'm a goodly thing”: The Ambiguous Lives of Eliza Cook’s Poeticising Plants’, En-tangled Approaches to Seaweed Conference, Haunted Shores Research Network, 20 May 2022.

2A: Writing Ecologies