I am a specialist in late medieval literature whose research often extends into the early modern period. My research typically takes a comparative, transcultural approach, as I work across multiple languages, and I integrate literary study with historical and book-historical approaches. I am particularly interested in the movement and transmission of texts across regional and linguistic borders, and in the place of English literary activity and book production in relation to continental Europe. I work on both manuscripts and early printed texts.

I am keen to share my passion for medieval books with non-academic audiences. I have appeared on BBC Radio 4 popular history podcast You're Dead to Me, BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking, the History Extra podcast, and BBC Radio York. I have written for BBC History Magazine and The Conversation, and I have given public talks for the Being Human Festival and the York Festival of Ideas. I also recorded readings from Middle English texts for sound projects relating to English Heritage and the York Minster, and I contributed to a museum exhibition on Mélusine at the Historial de la Vendée in France.

My first monograph The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts was published with D. S. Brewer in 2020 - it was shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2021. The study is the first to consider how the romance of Mélusine – about a beautiful fairy woman who is cursed to transform into a half-serpent once a week – itself transformed from a local legend to an international bestseller, analysing versions in French, German, Castilian, Dutch, and English. The book addresses timely questions on how to study medieval literature from a European perspective, moving beyond national canons, reading Mélusine’s bodily mutability as a metaphor for how the romance itself moves and transforms across borders. It analyses key changes to the romance’s content, form, and material presentation – including its images – and traces how the people who produced and owned/read this romance shaped its international transmission and spread.

My most recent project is ‘Continental Connections: European Bestselling Romances in England (c. 1400-1600)’ (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). It examines a group of European bestselling romances that arrive in England in the late medieval period and fuel new translation, copying, and printing activities. These romances have a complex international genealogy and have received little scholarly attention, as they do not fit in neatly with national canons or the usual focus on Anglo-French exchanges. The project breaks important ground by placing the English versions within a pan-European framework, to trace the international networks surrounding their production and readership, and to uncover to what extent these texts actively participate in European traditions and which features might set the English versions apart. The project sheds light on a period when English was not a world language but a marginal language, and when English literary culture was largely catching up with continental fashions.

I have also published on topics such as inter-vernacular translation, and the international circulation and copying of woodcuts in the early period of printing.

List by: Type | Date

2019–22  Principal Investigator, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, project ‘Continental Connections: European Bestselling Romances in England (c.1400-1600)’, £93,000.

I would be keen to supervise projects relating to medieval romance; translation and the cross-cultural movement of medieval and early modern books and texts; women and the book; early printed books and ideas of 'bestsellers'; English literature and its connections to continental traditions; transformations, otherworlds, and the supernatural; and medievalism. My core languages are medieval English, French, Dutch, Castilian, and German, but I would also be interested in comparative studies that include other European languages.

I currently lecture on Middle English and Early Modern English strands at pre-Honours, and I also convene and teach the Honours course 'Medieval Literature: Other Worlds'. At postgrad level, I convene and teach on the course 'Love, Death, and Dragons: Medievalism and Fantasy'.

Some recent public activities:

Episode on the History of Printing for You're Dead to Me (July 2024)

Recorded lines in Middle English for a sound and visual projection piece in the York Minster (2023)

Recorded lines from a Middle English Arthurian romance for the 'Voices of Clifford’s Tower' sound project with artist Karen Monid, for English Heritage (new soundscape active since 2023)

Talk at the event celebrating the 70th anniversary of Tolkien’s lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the University of Glasgow, organised by Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic (April 2023)

Contributed to BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking episode on Melusine (Jan. 2022)

'Medieval Romances, Trash Fiction, and Rebel Women’. Talk for York Festival of Ideas, sponsored by BBC History Magazine (2021)

'Knights, dragons, and beasts: the strange world of medieval romance’, History Extra podcast

Writing pieces for catalogue accompanying the exhibition Mélusine, secrets d'une fée at the Historial de la Vendée, France (2019)

Organised event on Medieval Magic at Barley Hall, and event on Medieval Magical Creatures for the York Festival of Ideas (2019)