Academics

Welcome

I completed my BA at the University of Bristol, before going on to study for an MPhil in European Romanticism at Glasgow and Bologna, and then for a PhD at Cambridge. I finished the thesis in 2000 and taught at Oxford before taking up lectureships at Sheffield (2001) and York (2005). I joined Keble in 2011.

I teach across the undergraduate syllabus, including Paper 1 (Introduction to Literary Studies), English Literature 1740-1832, and English Literature 1830-1910, plus various special authors and special topics. At graduate level, I currently co-convene the MSt in English, 1660-1830, with Dr Freya Johnston (St Anne’s) and I also teach on the 1800-1914 MSt.

Research Interests

My first book, The Art of Eloquence, explored the relations between political oratory and literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. My current research focuses mainly on poetry, and on the theory and practice of comedy. I’m completing an edited collection of essays, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, and Comedy: A Very Short Introduction. The latter book is related to a larger study I’m researching - The Sense of Humour: Poetic Comedies from Wordsworth to Auden. My other interest at the moment is poetic rhythm, and I have some essays coming out on this subject: ‘Counting Tennyson’ (on the poet’s natural and metrical numbers) and ‘Byron’s Feet’ (anatomical and prosodic varieties). I am also general co-editor with Freya Johnston of The Cambridge Edition of The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock.

In 2012 I will be giving the British Academy Chatterton Lecture on the poetry of Edward Lear.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

‘Byron’s Feet’, in Metre Matters: Verse Cultures of The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Ohio UP, 2011), 78-104

‘Wordsworth at Play’, Essays in Criticism, 61.1 (January 2011), 54-78

‘Tennyson’s Humour’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (OUP, 2009), 231-58

‘Deleecious’ (Hazlitt), The London Review of Books (6 November 2008), 26-8

‘Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (OUP, 2007), 7-33

‘Joyce’s Love Letters’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 44.2 (2007), 354-57

The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007; paperback 2010), pp. 302

Some Versions of Empson (OUP, 2007), ed., pp. 376, including the introduction, ‘Empson in the Round’, 1-20

‘A Knowing Look’, Essays in Criticism, 57.2 (2007), 171-9.

Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), ed., pp. xl + 504

‘Tennyson’s “Roses on the Terrace”: A New Manuscript’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 8.2 (2003), 118-20

‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.2 (Autumn 2003), 577-91

‘Tennyson, Ireland, and “The Powers of Speech”’, Victorian Poetry, 39 (Fall 2001), 345-64

‘Dickens in Public’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (July 2001), 330-52

‘Temporizing Dickens’, Review of English Studies, 52 (May 2001), 171-91

‘Ruskin, Bright, and the Politics of Eloquence’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 27.2 (Fall 2000), 177-90

Academic Biography

• University Lecturer and Fellow in English (2011 - present)
• Senior Lecturer in English Literature (University of York) (2005 - 2011)
• Lecturer in English and American Literature (University of Sheffield) (2001 - 2005)