I hold a BA in English Literature, an MA in Postcolonial Studies (both from the University of Kent), an MA in English Literature, and a PhD in Early Modern Literature (both from the University of Bristol). I joined Sussex in 2018, following posts at the University of Bristol and University of Sheffield. I'm a late entrant to an academic career, having worked in the legal sector for several years before returning to study at Bristol. 

My research is about the literature and culture of the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular emphasis on Tudor writers, print culture, and the histories of books, publishing, and printing. I have published widely in these areas. Current and past projects are author-based (focussing especially on William Baldwin and Edmund Spenser) and, increasingly, grounded in the areas of Animal Studies, Posthumanism, and Premodern Critical Race Studies. 

While I am trained as a literary scholar my interest in the printing and publishing trades means that the questions I ask are frequently those of the historian and are aimed at exploring the hidden histories of marginalised groups (related to, for example, regional print trades and women's history).

I am interested in the continuities between periods as much as the differences. To this end I co-edited a special edition of the journal Comparative Drama, entitled Chaucerian Resonances in Early Modern Drama: Shakespeare and Beyond (2021), and a collection of essays for The Manchester Spenser: Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester University Press, 2019).

My scholarship is both historically-embedded and theoretically-informed, reading widely between and within periods. This approach is exemplified in my first monograph, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (Routledge, 2018; paperback 2020), which analyses authors from William Caxton (fifteenth century) to Alexander Pope (eighteenth century). It argues that writers develop a shared set of techniques when they depict printing houses, printers, text-making technologies, and other phenomena of the world of print. The writers I study here engage what I call the 'typographic imaginary' to evaluate their place, and the place of the literary, in a rapidly changing media environment. 

I am a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College; I regularly peer review for journals and publishers, and am highly active in the scholarly communities of early modern studies and print culture studies. I hold a number of posts in these areas:

• The Spenser Review Editorial Board member
• Mentor for the Society of Renaissance Studies and Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network 
• Chair of the National Printing Heritage Committee
• Editor of the journal Publishing History
• Committee Member and Trustee of the Printing Historical Society
• Regional Representative for the Centre for Printing History and Culture
• Co-founding Executive Group member of the Virtual Museum of Printing

Here at Sussex I am a member of the Sussex Centre for Print Culture, a member and former director of the Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies, and an affiliate of the Sussex School for Progressive Futures.

I am the Lead for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities, and the University Academic Lead for CHASE, the Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South-East England. In these roles I sit on several University and Faculty committees supporting research culture and postgraduate education.

With a firm commitment to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in my teaching, scholarship, and research practice I have previously sat on my faculty’s People, Culture, and Inclusion Committee, and the Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter self-assessment groups.

I am an experienced mentor, having trained in the University of Sheffield’s Think Ahead programme, the Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities’ mentoring programme, in Sussex’s Cross-cultural Reciprocal Mentoring Project, and with the Society for Renaissance Studies and Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network mentoring scheme. In these contexts I regularly work as a mentor or mentee with academics at different career stages.

If you would like to discuss PhD supervision on any of the above or related topics, please read the Research and Teaching tabs in this profile, and contact me by email.