Role
As a lecturer in the English section of the School, I do specialist research in the Restoration and eighteenth century, as well as teach a wide variety of modules, with particular emphasis on early-modern texts and on gender.
Qualifications & background
PhD, Leeds, January 2007 (sup. Prof Vivien Jones, int ex Prof David Fairer, ext ex Prof Brean Hammond and Dr Kate Davies)
M St, Exeter College, Oxford, June 2001
BA Hons, Exeter College, Oxford, June 2000
Professional membership
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2005-
Teaching interests
I teach primarily in the period c. 1660-1830, and teaching interests include early-modern gender, the emergent novel, gender and Romanticism, the gothic, and literary analysis of 'non-literary' early-modern texts, such as conduct literature, sermons, and so forth.
Authors I am particularly interested in teaching include Restoration poets, Scriblerians such as Gay, Pope, and Swift, early popular novelists such as Behn and Haywood, mid-century novelists and cultural critics such as Richardson, Jane Collier, Charlotte Lennox, and others, and a wide gamut of later-century 'Romantic-era' women writers, including Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Inchbald.
Research interests
My research interests have so far focused on the work of the mid-eighteenth-century sentimental novelist and printer, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Particularly, I've been interested in how re-reading his work through the concerns and debates manifest in his last novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), help us to gain new insights both into Richardson's earlier work and into the mid- and late-century novel more generally.
I've published in recent years on Richardson and marriage, on Mary Wollstonecraft's adaptation for children of Grandison, on Richardson's influence on the feminist novelist Sarah Scott, and on Richardson's use of Anglican devotional memes. My current, final piece of work on Richardson centres on the relationship between Grandison and the controversial piece of legislation 26 Geo. II, 26, or Jewish Naturalization Act.
Subsidiary research interests include the poetry of Alexander Pope, on whose work I published my first article, and on the relationship between early modern science and literature, which will be the focus of my next project.
UoP Research group membership
English and Creative Writing
Publications
‘Courting Dominion: Sir Charles Grandison, Sir George Ellison, and the organising principle of masculinity’, The Eighteenth-Century Novel (forthcoming, vol. 8, 2010).
‘Pious frauds: “Honest tricks” and the Anglican tradition in Richardson’, special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Jeremy Gregory, 32: 3 (2009), 339-351.
‘Leaving little to the imagination: The mechanics of didacticism in two children’s adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s novels’, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, special issue on eighteenth-century didactic fiction for children, 33: 2 (2009), 167-88.
‘Apprehensions of controul: The familial politics of marriage, choice, and consent in Sir Charles Grandison’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31: 1 (2009), 1-19.
‘Alchemies of satire: A history of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock’, The Review of English Studies, 57: 232 (2006), 684-700.
Reports & invited lectures
Invited speaker at Northumbria University's eighteenth-century seminar series: 'Vox populi, vox dei: Samuel Richardson and the "Jew Bill" of 1753', January 2010
