My research focuses on early modern literature, with particular interests in ecocriticism, transculturality, and how drama interacts with other nascent, non-literary forms such as surveying manuals, cookery books, and husbandry manuals.
My monograph project, Earth, Realm, England: National Identity and the Land in Shakespeare’s English Histories, offers the first sustained ecocritical study of Shakespeare’s history plays, shedding new light on their portrayal of Englishness by positioning the land as a key force in early modern discourses of national identity.
My current research explores the ways in which transcultural encounters are paralleled in or reflected upon by the intertextual, collaborative relationship between different forms of early modern writing. I am particularly interested in how early modern Londoners understood and experienced cultural difference at the level of daily practice. Bringing together a diverse range of texts including drama, practical instruction books, and parliamentary legislation, I ask how early modern London assimilated difference across its shifting class structures.
At Keble, I teach FHS Papers 1: Shakespeare, 3: 1550-1660, and 4: 1660-1760. I also supervise undergraduate dissertations across the early modern period.
Select Publications:
Co-editing special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies on ‘Material Space and Literary Production c.1500-1651’ with Catherine Jenkinson. Forthcoming March 2026.
‘Minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey’: reconciling the local and the global in Shakespeare’s ‘Falstaff’ plays. Food & History. Forthcoming.
‘“Maister of the earth’? Reassessing the Monarch as Husbandman Metaphor in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (2023). DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2274410
‘Anne Boleyn: Harbinger of the English Reformation’, in English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, Vol. 3: Tudor and Stuart Consorts, ed. Aidan Norrie (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Co-authored with Samuel Lane.