About
My research ranges widely on literature from 1800-present and focuses on the ways that authors engage with ideas about science. I also serve as Deputy Director of the Literature and Science Hub Research Centre.
My first monograph on heredity in American literary culture is forthcoming in the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series. The monograph focuses on how four prominent American writers--Henry James, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Robins, and W. E. B. Du Bois--explored new conceptions of evolution and biological inheritance in their literary works. Work related to the project has been published or is forthcoming in Modern Drama; The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Drama (co-authored with Kirsten E Shepherd); Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature (with Alexandra Paddock and Kirsten E Shepherd); and The Shavian. Research for this project has been supported by a W. E. B. Du Bois Center Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2024 and the Ronald Bryden Scholarship by the International Shaw Society in 2022.
My new project is interested in the history of ideas about environment and indigeneity, and the engagement with these ideas in literature. Since 2021, I have been developing a thread of this project called 'Alternative Arctics'; it takes an innovative approach to writing about the North and South Poles by centring critically-neglected accounts of the poles by people of colour, women, and Inuit writers. Work from the project has been selected to appear as part of the British Academy-Royal Irish Academy Knowledge Frontiers Symposium on the Future and has received collaborative SHAPE seed funding for upcoming projects with collaborators from across the UK and Ireland. A new thread of this project focusing on the relations between early-twentieth century American Folk Drama and Native American cultures has recently been awarded the E. Peter Mauk, Jr./Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. Fellowship at the Huntington Library.
I am increasingly interested in the relationship between the humanities and digital practices. Since 2018, I have been a core member, alongside Kirsten E Shepherd and Alexandra Paddock, of the digital reading project LitHits, which was developed alongside Oxford University Innovations. LitHits connects non-specialist readers with a curated extracts of literature. We are publishing work from this project as the forthcoming book: The Ten Minute Book Club (Bodleian Library Publishing). Additionally, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter by clicking here.
I serve as executive committee member at the British Association for Modernist Studies, where I was chair of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. I am also a member of the British Society for Literature and Science, British Association for American Studies, International Shaw Society, and Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland. I helped to organize the 2023 biennial conference for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, as well as the 2023 New Work in Modernist Studies Graduate Conference.
I started at Liverpool as the William Noble Research Fellow in English in 2021 before becoming Lecturer in 2023. I completed my doctoral thesis in English at the University of Oxford (2021), where I was Esmond Harmsworth Graduate Scholar at the Rothermere American Institute; doctoral research assistant on the European Research-funded project Diseases of Modern Life; and research fellow at the École normale supérieure, Paris. I completed my MA in English: 1850 to present at King's College London and my BA in English, History, and Latin at Illinois State University.
Prospective PhD students looking to work on any of the research interests mentioned above are encouraged to contact me. My academic support and feedback hours are 2-3pm Thursday and 2-3pm Friday. E-mail me to make an appointment.