About
I joined Liverpool in 2024 after completing my PhD and MA at Sussex and my BA at Cambridge. My primary research interests are the environmental humanities and medical humanities with a historical focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Particular interests include Romantic poetry; Scottish Enlightenment thought; literature and economics; political ecology; and the history of psychology (all of which look much more connected in the eighteenth-century than they do now).
I am currently working on my first monograph, entitled 'Nature’s Consolation: Poetry, Environment, Psychoanalysis 1740-1820', which uses an interdisciplinary archive of eighteenth-century philosophical, medical and poetic writings to investigate the emergence of an eighteenth-century ‘nature cure’ for mental illness. Reading works by David Hume, Adam Smith, Charlotte Smith and William Cowper alongside texts from the psychiatric archive, this work argues that eighteenth-century proponents of the 'nature cure' become increasingly aware of how the more-than-human world is instrumentalised and reshaped to make it amenable to mental health therapies. Work related to this project has been published in Literature & Medicine and The Cambridge Quarterly.
My postdoctoral research re-examines the long eighteenth century from a more explicitly materialist basis, examining how the rapid development of Britain and America's canal systems shaped economic thought and literary form. Considering works by John Dyer, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and John Crabbe, alongside the American poets Philip Freneau and William Cullen Bryant, this project reinterprets literary romanticism as a negotiation with the financial and infrastructural revolutions of the eighteenth-century.
My academic support and feedback hours this term (Semester 1, 2024-25) are Mondays 12-1 and Thursdays 12-1, in my office (1/006, 22 Oxford Street) or online. In both cases please email to say you are coming as 22 Oxford Street has swipe card access so I will need to let you in.