I was appointed at Sussex in 2016, taking up the role of Head of the School of English. In 2020 I became Associate Dean for Research in the newly combined School of Media, Arts and Humanities. I am now an Emeritus Professor of Literature and Poetics, having retired in 2023. I previously taught in the Department of English at Birkbeck, University of London, where I was appointed in 1989. My first degrees were in English and American Literature at Warwick, followed by a D.Phil at Oxford on Laurence Sterne, working with Terry Eagleton. While at Birkbeck from 2008 I co-directed the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre with William Rowe.

In 2011 I was awarded an Individual National Teaching Fellowship by the HEA for my creative work developing the experimental Voiceworks programme for the CPRC – an annual song making project with Wigmore Hall and Guildhall Conservatoire, connecting poets and writers with student composers and opera singers to create new repertoire. This emphasis on collaborative and critical/creative practice and thought has increasingly become central to the way my research has developed, as my writing as a poet has emerged and become a singular focus.

I have published 12 books and works of poetry, from brass, running (Equipage, 2006) and Wrack (Reality Street, 2007) to Kelptown (Shearsman, 2020) and A Time of Eels (Oystercatcher, 2021), and most recently Mimic Pond (Shearsman, 2024). I often publish poems online as well as working in other forms and media, such as in the artist's books alphabetise (2005) and Flete (2014), which have found their way into exhibitions.

My work has been anthologised in The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, Debajo La Hierba, Arriba La Boveda Del Cielo: Ventanas Al Paisaje Britanico, The Dark Would Anthology of Language Art, and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK.

My critical work includes books on Dorothy Richardson and Sterne, with a monograph The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Edinburgh & Toronto, 2007). Recent critical writing is wholly focused on poetics, and on the practice of ecopoetry in particular, with work on poetry and place, field recording, biomimicry, and walking as ‘exploration by legwork’, as well as engaging with the poetry of Alice Notley, Peter Larkin, J.H. Prynne, Lisa Robertson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Doug Oliver and Denise Riley, and most recently the engagement with land in the work of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Lorine Niedecker,  Allen Fisher, Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker, Layli Long Soldier and Linda Russo. Over time I have explored different ways of listening in critical terms to poets and poetry, exemplified for me in the curating of Constellation: Alice Notley (http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2008/10/18.html).

I frequently work with other poets and artists, such as poet George Szirtes in an exchange called 56 (Arc, 2016); sound artist Will Montgomery, in a three-part exchange of field recordings and poetry including Pitch (https://soundcloud.com/will-montgomery/pitch) Mother Blake, and T.R.E.E.; and composer Dave Maric, on a text for his concerto Vigil, performed at the Cheltenham Festival in 2016, including this cadenza (https://davemaric.bandcamp.com/track/vigils-cadenza). Current collaborative projects include participating with words and sounds in Evelyn Ficarra’s Robo_Po / Robot_Op project with composers, a singer, choreographer and poets, to explore vocal encounters with Cleo Mesmer, a new generation robot. I’m proud to have contributed to the Refugee Tales project which aims to end indefinite detention,(https://www.28for28.org/videos/the-interpreters-tale), with a short story currently being transformed into opera. I've also worked with colleagues in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School on developing a storytelling intervention in the health of Nepalese migrants, led by Priya Paudal: https://www.bsms.ac.uk/research/primary-care-and-population-health/public-health/cosmin/cosmin.aspx.

My research and practice as a poet is focused on voice and sound, and vocal performance in a reading is important to me as a kind of testing ground to the ear. Each collection is a conceptual working through: from the fake sundogs and Kepler’s harmonies of the universe in Sundog, to the taxonomies of blue light in the elegies of When Blue Light Falls, and the prime numbers used to count sheep via a Riemannian imagining on a Welsh hillside in Zeta Landscape. My work tries consistently to push at the limits of a form of experimental nature writing, but one that is trying to explore the acoustic ecologies of poetry as it senses and encounters planetary crises and stakes of living, from the kelp forests of the south coast – communities of interspecies dependence - to the migratory longfin eels that figure in my pamphlet, A Time of Eels.

Current writing and practice has been focused on ponds - whether the seasonal pond on Blackheath in London which is the site of a thousand years of gathering and rebellion, or the ghost ponds which are the repositories of seed memories. Work drawn from a walking project over several years started in the lockdown of the pandemic resulted in my most recent Mimic Pond collection. This has led to new writing on swallets and hibernacula, currently in progress.

Lecture - 'Land//marks: On poetry, attunement, and the "long long story of   land", Morag Morris Lecture, University of Surrey, 12 Nov 2024

https://vimeo.com/1030764264?share=copy#t=0

Videos of readings:
This is Red
https://vimeo.com/17114334
Sundog
https://vimeo.com/54158332
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DwTFkO0RCI
When Blue Light Falls 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ3FvNctoZU
56
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4qV9e7hT5M

Recent critical work on my poetry:
Philip Jones, 'Where Landedness Ends: Gender, Power and Belonging in the Watery Poetry of Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley and Carol Watts', Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, published online March 2022.
Zoe Skoulding, ‘Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’ in her Poetry and Listening: The Noise of Lyric (Liverpool, 2020)
Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell on Dockfield in Jacket 2: https://jacket2.org/reviews/reading-weed-acts
Alice Entwhistle on site specific practice and Zeta Landscape in ‘Counting Form: Gender and the Geometries of Address, in Frances Presley and Carol Watts’, Humanities 9:2 (48), June 2020.
Carole Birkan-Berz and Zoe Skoulding, 'Translating Sound and Resonance in Experimental Poetry from the UK: a Cross-Channel Perspective', Palimpsestes: Revue de Traduction 28 (2015): https://doi.org/10.4000/palimpsestes.2193