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MA, MPhil, PhD (Cambridge)

I came to Birmingham in 2005 from the universities of Cambridge and Leeds; I studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, and held a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leeds.

I enjoy teaching across the full range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at Birmingham, with a particular concentration in writing of the early modern and romantic periods.

I received an Award for Excellence in both elements of the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education that I completed at Birmingham in 2011; in 2008 I was awarded one of the University's Excellence in Teaching prizes. I have been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since November 2011.

I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students across the range of my teaching and research interests.

I have been the lead or co-supervisor for a number of students who have completed their doctorates:

Wendy Trevor, whose thesis explored the varieties of dramatised male friendship in the early modern period, and is now Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs at Maria College, NY ;
Natalie Aldred, who edited William Haughton's play, Englishmen for My Money;
Harry Newman, whose thesis explored questions of impression and identity in Shakespeare, and who is now a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London;
Kerry Cooke, who wrote on professionalism in Angel Day's manual, The English Secretary, and is now Assistant Professor of Theatre and Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, VA;
Jennie Challinor, whose AHRC-funded research explored the drama of the 1670-71 theatre season, and who is now a Teaching Fellow in English Literature in our School;
Georgina Hildick-Smith, who wrote on education and value in early modern drama;
Phil Jones, who wrote on the reception of Samuel Johnson;
Neil Halliday, who wrote on De Quincey and Romantic autobiography; and
Aurora Martinez, who wrote on pastoral from Marvell to Wordsworth;
Nicola Westwood, who wrote on Romantic-period abolitionist literature.

I am currently lead or co-supervisor for the following students:

Charlotte Evans, who is writing on Keats and early modern writers;
Heloise Senechal, who is editing Thomas Dekker's play, Satiromastix; and
Wendy Armstrong, who is editing some of Anthony Munday's prose pamphlets.

I am interested in supervising MA, MPhil and PhD candidates in the following areas and will be pleased to respond to enquiries:

Early modern poetry and drama, including Shakespeare
Romantic writing
The relationships of Renaissance and Romantic writers
Ben Jonson and his contemporaries
Charles Lamb and his collaborators
The relationships of manuscript and print

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡.

My research explores the relationships between Renaissance writers and their later readers, and the material forms in which these and other textual exchanges take place. My first book,  (Oxford University Press, 2005), explores the many forms in which Jonson was mobile within the Romantic period. The book is part of my ongoing interest in the ways in which understandings of Renaissance writers and their texts have transformed by the history of their productions, publication and readership.

I delivered the Chatterton Lecture on English Poetry at the British Academy in October 2009, speaking on the title ‘Donne, By Hand’ (). I earlier spoke at the British Academy on ‘Milton in the Twentieth Century’ as part of a colloquium to celebrate the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth in December 2008, later published in . I have published widely on poetic and dramatic manuscripts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: I was awarded The Review of English Studies Essay Prize (2003) for my article, '', and my article reporting the text of a new country house poem, '', was chosen for republication in the 40th Anniversary Virtual Issue of English Literary Renaissance. A new piece in The Review of English Studies announces ‘’, and begins a conversation about the reasons why we might now need of a new edition of Davies’s Works.

My chapter on the poetry and career of one of Francis Bacon’s chaplains, William Lewis, formed part of a collection of essays published by Manchester University Press, Chaplains in Early Modern England, which I co-edited with Hugh Adlington and Gillian Wright; and I have explored Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) and Extracts from the Garrick Plays (1827). My article on William Hazlitt's reading and use of Lamb's ³§±è±ð³¦¾±³¾±ð²Ô²õÌýwas published in The Hazlitt Review (2014), and I wrote about Lamb's newly recovered copy of Ben Jonson in a piece comparing his responses to Jonson with those of John Thelwall, ''.

My most recent piece explores ''; and I am currently working on book chapters on Ben Jonson's poetry and on Dryden and Congreve, both for Oxford University Press.