Role
Associate Dean & Head of School of Humanities and Performing Arts
Qualifications & background
M.A.(University of Cambridge)
Ph.D (University of Strathclyde)
Professional membership
Research interests
I have worked chiefly on the eighteenth-century Scottish writer James Macpherson and associated issues of national identity and cultural politics in eighteenth-century Britain. I have published widely on the work of Macpherson and associated figures in a number of disciplines, including a full length study of Macpherson’s Ossian and a 4 volume set of Ossian-related materials. My current work on Macpherson includes editing a forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to James Macpherson. I am also currently working on the literary and social culture of Devon and Cornwall in the late eighteenth century.
Other research
Grants & contracts
2006: British Academy Overseas Conference Grant to speak at University of California, Berkeley.
2002-2003: Arts and Humanities Research Board, Research Leave scheme.
Publications
Most recent publications include:
'The Reception of Ossian in Britain' in Quaderni 11 (2010), 60-62
' "A Blank Made": Ossian and the Imaginative Possibilities of Forgery', in Romanticism, Sincerity, Authenticity, ed Kerry Sinanan and Tim Milnes, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp.58-79
'Patriotism, Politeness and National Identity in the South West of England in the Late Eighteenth Century', English Literary History 76.3 (Fall 2009), 739-762
'"As Flies the Unconstant Sun": Tradition, Memory and Cultural Transmission in The Poems of Ossian', Eighteenth-Century Ireland 23 (2008), 76-93
'Devolving Romanticism: Nation, Region and the case of Devon and Cornwall', Literature Compass 5 (2008): 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00567.x
‘The Ossianic Revival, James Beattie and Primitivism’ in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire, ed Susan Manning, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 90-99.
'Tennyson, Malory and the Ossianic Mode: The Poems of Ossian and "The Death of Arthur", The Review of English Studies vol. 57 no.230 (Autumn, 2006), 374-391
'James Macpherson and "Celtic Whiggism"', Eighteenth-Century Life, 30.1 (Winter, 2006), 1-24
'The Reception of Ossian in England and Scotland' in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed Howard Gaskill, (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004)
'"The Truth of Midnight and the Truth of Noonday": Madness and Sensation in Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night' in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, ed Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
(ed and intro), Ossian and Ossianism, 4 volumes, (London: Routledge, 2004)
Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of Ossian (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003)
'Examining Ossian’s Romantic Bequest’ in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed by Alan Rawes and Gerard Carruthers, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.38-53
