Biography
I read for my BA in English Language and Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where I was awarded the Mrs Claude Beddington English Literature Prize and two Gibbs Prizes. In the following year, I took my MLitt in Victorian Literature at the University of Glasgow, before embarking on my doctoral studies at Cambridge University, funded by the AHRC. During 2019, I spent three months working within a SEND school in Cambridge, and am committed to continuing to work in the area of special education.
Research
My PhD explores representations of eccentrics and eccentricity between the mid-eighteenth and later nineteenth century; it draws on a range of theorists, from David Hume to the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, working on comparable problems around failed or functionally imperfect sympathy with others.
I write mainly on late eighteenth-century and nineteenth literature, both poetry and prose. My research interests include the comic; play and creativity; reverie, dream and unproductive states; nonsense; associationism; habit and social character; the history of emotion; British romantic poetry and prose; appetite and anorexia. I have a passionate interest in psychoanalysis (especially Freud, D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner).
Publications
‘"Antic Dispositions": Lear and Dickens’, Victorian Poetry (forthcoming, Summer 2020).
‘Charles Lamb’s Imperfect Solitudes’, Romanticism (accepted).
Teaching and Supervisions
At Cambridge, I teach the papers Practical Criticism and Critical Practise; English Literature and its Contexts 1660-1870; Love, Gender, Sexuality 1740-1824; The English Moralists
I have supervised Part 1 and 2 dissertations on nonsense poetry; satire and bodily fluids; Wordsworth’s curatorial impulses. I am always happy to hear from students working on my research interests.
Other Professional Activities
I recently I co-organising a two-day conference at King's College, Cambridge on the subject of Happiness: Enlightenment to Present. In the pipeline for 2020 is a conference on 'Habit in the Long Eighteenth Century' (the Cfp can be found here).
