Research Interests

• Eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature
• Authorship
• Archives and manuscripts
• Book History, particularly publishing and library history
• Material culture
• Institutional histories and practices
• Representations of London
• Digital Humanities
• Genre writing, particularly Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Contemporary narrative media

Biography

I joined the University of Glasgow in September 2016 from my previous post at the University of Birmingham.  I completed my BA at the University of Cambridge, my MA at King’s College London and my PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London.  Between 2008 and 2014, I worked at the British Library, cataloguing the archive of the Royal Literary Fund and contributing to exhibitions - I helped to research Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands in 2012 and co-curated (with Zoë Wilcox) The Worlds of Mervyn Peake in 2011.  I have taught previously at universities in London and Oxford.  In 2013, I held a Fleeman Fellowship at the University of St Andrews and in 2015, I took up a Charles J. Cole Fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale.

My doctoral project considered the nature of literary careers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contending that the principal modes for achieving success as an author at this time were social, rather than professional, commercial or aesthetic.  I combined literary, historical and sociological approaches with detailed archival work on publishers’ records, institutional papers and personal correspondence.  My work explored the meagre financial rewards offered by the publishing industry; the Royal Literary Fund and its struggling applicants; the contexts that allowed Robert Southey, Thomas Moore and Walter Scott to prosper by writing; the kinds of authority propagated by the powerful quarterly Reviews; and the crucial roles played by affiliation and networking in ensuring literary success.  I have published an article and a book chapter that draw on this work and I have recently submitted a heavily revised version for publication as a monograph entitled Living as an Author in the Romantic Period.

Alongside this project, I completed a catalogue of the Archive of the Royal Literary Fund, a charitable organisation set up in 1790 to provide confidential financial aid to struggling writers.  This catalogue consists of over 78,000 records covering applications from more than 3600 authors who first applied to the Fund between 1790 and 1939, as well as entries for minute books, annual reports and administrative papers.  An open-access database of this catalogue will be made available shortly.

I have keen interests in fantasy, science fiction and contemporary literature.  I have published book chapters on Mervyn Peake and China Miéville and I teach on the Fantasy MLitt.

I have an ongoing digital project that examines the ways in which Romantic-period London was represented across a wide range of genres through juxtaposing different kinds of maps, images and accounts.  I have recently published several journal articles drawing on this work.

I have a longstanding interest in literary institutions (particularly libraries and universities).  This resulted in the AHRC-funded ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ research network, which I led alongside Professor Jon Mee (University of York).  We are building on this work by developing publications and through a new Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project on 'The Media Revolution of the 1820s'.  I have published research on literary institutions in London, the university library at St Andrews and the library of William Hunter and am currently leading a project on the University of Glasgow's eighteenth-century borrowing registers.

I have served on the Executive of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) since 2009.  Currently, I am the association’s Website Editor.

April 2018-March 2020: 'The Media Revolution of the 1820s' - a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded research network assembled in collaboration with Jon Mee (University of York) to explore the importance of an understudied decade, during which the costs of printing fell dramatically, the speed of communications rose, mediating institutions expanded and new technologies of expression proliferated.

April 2018-April 2019: 'Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities' - a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant-funded project seeking to digitise, transcribe, interpret and contextualise the University of Glasgow's surviving eighteenth-century library borrowing registers.

September 2016-December 2017: ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ (Principal Investigator) - an AHRC-funded research network conducted in collaboration with Jon Mee.  Details of the network's workshops can be seen on the project website; a publication is forthcoming.

March-April 2015: Charles J. Cole Fellowship, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

March-June 2013: Fleeman Fellowship, School of English, University of St Andrews. (resulting publication)

I have an ongoing collaborative relationship with the Royal Literary Fund, which supported my doctorate and which has provided subsequent tranches of funding to further my explorations of the RLF archive.

I have also secured numerous smaller grants to support my digitisation work and my attendance at conferences and symposia.

I am keen to supervise postgraduate students in any of my areas of expertise and am particularly keen to work with Romanticists, book historians and students of Fantasy.  I am currently co-supervising work on nineteenth-century connections in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

I teach widely across the curriculum at Glasgow.  In 2017/18, I taught my own courses 'Visions of London (Senior Honours) and 'Fantasy Across Media' (MLitt); convened 'Inventing the Modern: Literature 1660-1780' (Junior Honours) and deputy-convened 'Writing and Ideology' (2A).  I also contributed teaching to the MLitt in Victorian Literature and the 'Encountering Environments' course.  In addition, I lecture on 'Poetry and Poetics' (1A), 'The Novel and Narratology' (1B), 'Literature 1780-1840' (Junior Honours) and 'Literature 1945-present' (Junior Honours).

I am convenor of the MLitt English Literature (the general programme) and the new Romantic Worlds MLitt pathway, and am happy to answer questions from potential applicants about either of these.

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