麻豆精选

• BA (English Literature and History; Keele University)
• MA and PhD (English; University of Bristol)

After completing a BA in English and History at Keele 鈥� following a brief foray into Music 鈥� I moved to Bristol to pursue an MA with a particular focus on English Romanticism, sowing the seeds for a long-standing interest in the Gothic imagination and all things watery. At Bristol I completed my PhD, 鈥楾reacherous Lines: Death and the Limits of Language in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville鈥�, which fostered another enduring interest in theories of poststructuralism and deconstruction. I joined the University 麻豆精选 in 2015.

My teaching and supervision focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, though I have taught widely across the discipline. I convene a number of modules for English Literature and American & Canadian Studies students. Courses I currently convene include:

• Literature at Sea (Level 3, co-convenor with Dr Fariha Shaikh)
• American Frontiers: Nation and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Level 3, convenor)
• Gothic (Level 2)

Other courses I teach, or have taught on, include:

• Nineteenth-Century Senses (MA)
• Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (MA)
• Victorian Literature (Level 2)
• Uses of Genre (Level 2)
• Tragedy (Level 2)
• New World Orders (Level 2)
• Plays & Performance (Level 1)
• Prose (Level 1)
• Discovering North American Literature (Level 1)
• Research Skills in American and Canadian Studies (Level 1)

I would be delighted to supervise postgraduate work and research projects, and invite expressions of interest, in any of the following areas:

- Nineteenth-century American literature 鈥� especially Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr.

- The Gothic 鈥� I have research specialisms in American Gothic, maritime Gothic, contemporary British Gothic, and sonic Gothic, but I maintain an interest in the genre across periods and regions.

- Maritime writing, the deep sea, and coastal studies; critical theory 鈥� especially oceanic studies (the Blue Humanities), animal studies, ecocriticism, and poststructuralism; the American frontier.

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Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University 麻豆精选.

There have been two main strands to my research to date: the American Gothic and the literature of the sea. I am interested in these as both individual and overlapping areas of study; I also maintain a long-standing interest in the work of Herman Melville.

My first book, Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic (UWP, June 2021), explored the many voices we hear in nineteenth-century American Gothic writing: haunted, haunting, disembodied, from beyond the grave, unintelligible, and animal. I am still substantially motivated by careful attention to strange, disruptive, outlandish 鈥淕othic鈥� voices. I鈥檓 especially motivated by the following questions: What ethical imperatives are loaded into encounters with Gothic voices? What do these voices demand? What do we gain by listening to them (or lose by ignoring them)? How does the Gothic voice help us comprehend the limits and shortcomings of our own worldview? What does it mean to commune with monsters?

The other strand of my research focuses on the literature of the sea 鈥� especially in nineteenth-century writing, in whaling literature, and gothic literature. I am currently involved in several projects that explore the cultural histories of our seas and beaches.

鈥� 聽 聽With Dr Laurence Publicover (Bristol), I鈥檓 writing a book titled The Seafloor: A Human History, exploring the profound human presence that exists in a region that is so frequently imagined as being beyond the ken of the human.

鈥� 聽 聽My second monograph examines the political histories of Britain鈥檚 and Ireland鈥檚 coastlines, as imagined in the Gothic tradition. The book, Gothic Coasts: Littoral Terrors in Britain and Ireland, 1700鈥揚resent, is under contract with Cambridge University Press, for their Elements in the Gothic series; it tells a story of our coastlines from Robinson Crusoe through to Brexit and twenty-first century migration.

鈥� 聽 聽I co-convene the Haunted Shores research network. In 2021, we published an anthology of gothic fiction, Our Haunted Shores, with the British Library. This network is open to anyone who is interested in the representation of coastal regions in the Gothic, or in how a Gothic vocabulary frequently infuses how we speak about the liminal, shifting sands of our shorelines. Another off-shoot of this is my abiding interest in the Gothic literature of the Fens in East Anglia 鈥� especially in work by Caryl Churchill, Daisy Johnson, Susan Hill, and Michelle Paver.

鈥� 聽 聽My next project on shorelines will depart somewhat 鈥� though not entirely 鈥� from the Gothic, as I turn to the role of beaches and bayous in late-nineteenth-century American local colour writing. This work explores the coastal communities and livelihoods depicted in work by writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and 鈥� a later writer 鈥� Rachel Carson.

More recently, I have become interested in the literary culture local to Birmingham and the Midlands. This has developed into an emergent research project on the Gothic literary history of the region: I am currently editing a special issue of the Midland History journal (for 2024) exploring the 鈥榟aunted Midlands鈥�. My particular interests here are on works by writers such as Elizabeth Jane Howard, Robert Aickman, Francis Brett Young, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and Washington Irving.

I’m currently Admissions Tutor, alongside Dr Eleanor Dobson, for English Literature and for American & Canadian Studies.

Through my work on the sea, I work closely with the Perspective from the Sea research cluster, an interdisciplinary research group established at the University of Bristol.

I have reviewed for Gothic Studies, The Journal of Victorian Culture, MLR, and American Literary History.