Profile

I'm Senior Associate Professor (Reader) in Romantic Literature, working principally on cultural politics 1790-1850, and focusing on the writers William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - as well as more recently, Ann Radcliffe. I've recently been appointed Senior Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London's School of Advanced Study, and Fleeman Visiting Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews - two positions which will support a pair of ongoing research projects. These are: a monograph on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Idea of History; and a scholarly edition of Ann Radcliffe's gothic romance, 'The Romance of the Forest' (1791) - due to be published in 2025 as Vol. 3 in the 'Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe' from Cambridge University Press (2024 to 2027).

My publications include a monograph on Wordsworth, 'Gothic Romanticism', which was awarded the 28th Modern Language Association of America (MLA) Prize for Independent Scholars for Distinguished Research in Language and Literature, and has recently been republished in an expanded and updated second edition (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-96832-8). In 2018, I published a two-volume critical edition of Robert Southey's 1829 major work of social commentary and literary humanist critique, 'Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society' (Routledge, 2018).

I've published widely in journals such as 'Romanticism', 'Review of English Studies', and 'The Wordsworth Circle', and have also contributed chapters to a number of major field-defining volumes, including 'Gothic and the Arts' (2019), 'The Cambridge History of the Gothic' (2020), 'The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism' (2020), 'The New Cambridge Companion to Coleridge' (2022), and 'The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose' (forthcoming, 2024).

I'm committed to academic citizenship and advocacy for literary studies, and serve as such as an Associate Editor of the journal 'Romanticism'; as a Committee Member of the Friends of Coleridge (elected 2023); a Life Member of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation (elected 2018); and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (elected 2022). I'm also a member of the MLA, the English Association, the British Association for Romantic Studies, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association.

At XJTLU, I currently serve as Associate Head of the Department of Literary and Translation Studies, with previous experience as Chair of the University Teaching Centre Committee (2019-2022), Deputy Head of the Department of English (2018-2021), and Programme Director of the BA English and Communication Studies (2012-2015), among other roles. I co-designed the BA English Studies programme as Subject Leader for Literature. I run the 'Romantic Horizons' research seminar, which has been hosting talks from research leaders in the field since 2020.

My teaching includes LIT303 Romanticism (S1), and LIT304 The Gothic (S2). I have previously supervised to completion a PhD project on history in the Gothic Romance writer, Ann Radcliffe. I now have an open call for a funded PhD scholarship on Literary Biography (https://www.xjtlu.edu.cn/wp-content/uploads/assets/files/admissions/phd-projects/eng/PGRSSP220301_PhD_Studentship_Advert.pdf). I welcome enquiries about research supervision in any of my areas of interest.