About
I specialise in the language of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, with particular focus on issues relating to dialect in romantic-period writing. My most recent monograph, The Language of Early English Dialect Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), is the first book devoted entirely to that strange and sophisticated body of work that emerged in the sixteenth century and peaked in the Victorian period, and whose primary aim was to show how people talked in the different parts of England. In 2014, I published my first book, The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity (Bucknell University Press), which employed ideas from twenty-first century sociolinguistics to explore the creative and self-reflexive ways in which Burns reinvented the linguistic resources at his disposal. Dialect matters are also the focus of my work on William Wordsworth, John Clare, the eighteenth-century Cumbrian writer Josiah Relph and the novels of the early nineteenth century. At present I am undertaking a British Academy-funded project on issues relating to style and literacy in the poetry of the Cockney School, a network of Regency-era writers including Leigh Hunt, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I have a secondary research interest in the legacies of romantic literature in fiction and film, and have published on the subject of the romantics in alternate history narratives.
My teaching interests span language and literature. On the language side, I convene a first-year stylistics module; on the literature side, I convene a module on Restoration and eighteenth-century writing. Beyond these modules, topics I lecture and teach on range from romanticism to science fiction and from code-switching in conversation to spelling on cereal boxes. Proposals for dissertations on anything relating to dialect writing, romanticism (especially where language or regionalism is concerned) or Romantic legacies are very welcome.
My academic support and feedback hours this term are Tuesday 2-2.50pm (online) and Friday 11-11.50am (in-person). Please email me beforehand to make an appointment.