Personal Biography

I joined Corpus as Career Development Fellow in 2021 from Cambridge, where I completed my PhD in 2019 and was a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College from 2019-2021. As well as teaching in universities, I have taught on university-level English courses in a number of UK prisons, and am enthusiastic about continuing to work in the overlaps between these communities.  

Research and Teaching

My PhD read the poet Edmund Spenser alongside bishop Lancelot Andrewes (the two attended the same school and the same Cambridge college at around the same time), proposing that ideologies of the short and efficient, the organised, the hierarchical, the one-size-fits-all diagrammatic text, offer new ways of understanding the pedagogical aspirations and the formal mechanisms of Andrewes’s literary homiletics and Spenser’s religious allegories. This project was preoccupied by an idea of ‘Renaissance Diagrammatics’—poetic economies of page space and prayer time; versions of large in small, or extraordinary in ordinary, and the anxieties and humilities involved in such accommodated ‘insteads’.

My current research and book project (perhaps titled Modernist Renaissance) is an experiment in what happens if we bring early modern writers into parallels with modernist ones—reading two literary-historical periods in binocular vision to see what their conversations across a gap can teach us about how reading works, and how we go about literary criticism. I’m especially interested at the moment in Gertrude Stein, Lancelot Andrewes, Thomas Nashe, early radio, and William Carlos Williams—and in sound effects, repetitions, puns, toads, diagrams, and spaniels.

At Corpus I teach all papers that fall between 1550 and 1800.

Publications

'A Likeness Only Fancied? Lancelot Andrewes and Gertrude Stein', The Cambridge Quarterly 52.2 (2023): 99–121.

‘For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to the Faerie Queene’, The Review of English Studies 71.300 (2020): 460-485.

‘A Doctor of another facultie: Robert Aylett and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Poetics’, English Literary Renaissance 50.3 (2020): 417-449.

‘Souvenir: Lucie Brock-Broido’s True Kitsch’, in Forms of Late Modernist Lyric, ed. Edward Allen (Liverpool University Press, 2021), 151-186. 

‘Prose Rhythm’, in The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe, ed. Kate De Rycker, Andrew Hadfield, and Jennifer Richards (Oxford University Press, 2023). Forthcoming.