Staff Profile

I completed my PhD at Durham University (2021); my thesis 'That Ill Opinion: Robert Burns and the British Romantic Tradition' focused on Robert Burns's influence on the poetry of major English Romantic poets, with chapters on Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. My project was supervised by Professor Fiona Robertson and Professor Mark Sandy, and was generously funded by the Durham Faculty of the Arts and Humanities (DDS).

Since completing my PhD, I have worked as a Tutor at Durham University, teaching Classical and Biblical literature in translation. In January 2022, I joined Newcastle University as Associate Lecturer, where I teach across all years of the Undergraduate degree.

I am currently working on three projects: I am developing my PhD thesis into my first monograph; I am in the early stages of a new project focused on conceptions of friendship in Romantic period poetry. Tentatively titled 'Reciprocities of the Imagination: Friendship and Poetry in the Romantic Period', this project reads a wide cast of Romantic poets, including Burns and his community, the Wordsworths and Coleridge, Keats and his circle, as well as Byron, Scott, and Moore; I am a co-investigator for The Science of Literature: Interdisciplinary Study of Textual Influence Based on Context-Oriented Machine Learning’. This international, interdisciplinary project comprised of eight scholars from Literary Studies, Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics, focused on developing a programme which assesses echo and allusion through machine learning, based on content and meaning.

In April 2023, I undertook a guest-lectureship at Chuo University, Tokyo Japan, where I lectured on British Romantic Literature and Culture.

Research interests include Romantic literature; poetry and poetics; influence studies; 19th and 20th Century British and American poetry; literary essays (Hazlitt, Trilling, Arendt,); Epic poetry.

Chapters in Edited Volumes:

. ‘So, We’ll Go No More A Roving’: The language of Love and Friendship in Byron’s Letters Romantic Synchronicity: Literary Coincidence and the poetics of Simultaneity (EUP 2024)

Journal Articles:

.‘A Long and Clamorous Bray’: Echo and Allusion in Peter Bell The Wordsworth Circle, 53.4, 2023.

·The Art of Easy Writing’: The Case of Burns and Byron, Romanticism, vol 28.3, September 2022.

·'By contraries joined’: Wordsworth’s Friendship with Burns, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, December 2021.

·Antithetical Minds: Eliot’s Byron and Byron’s Burns, The Byron Journal, 49.1 November 2020.

Edited works:

Special issue, Humour and Satire in British Romanticism, Romanticism, 28.3, ed. with Daniel Norman and Valentina Varinelli (September, 2022).

Stage One:

SEL1023: Transformations

Stage Two:

SEL2203: Revolutionary Britain

Stage Three:

SEL3362: Dissertation in English Literature