Personal Biography

After a first degree in Theology (at Cambridge), I was lucky to win a scholarship to pursue a second undergraduate degree in English at Oxford. I subsequently returned to Cambridge for the MPhil and completed my DPhil at Oxford in 2021, supported by a joint award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and All Souls College. From 2020-23 I was Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where – together with a colleague in Classics – I founded the Cambridge Lyric Network. Outside my academic research I have written widely about literature and ideas for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Art Newspaper.

Research and Teaching

I work on nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, focusing on poetry and non-fiction prose. My current book project studies the passionate, compromised quests to know people – oneself, one another, and God – in a wide range of Victorian poems. From Robert Browning to Alice Meynell, poets across the period show how the failure to know people as surely, or as intimately, as we desire may produce a host of unsuspected possibilities and pleasures. Building on Wittgenstein’s thinking about language and scepticism, and the ‘ethical turn’ in work on Victorian fiction, I show how poetry offers a different vision of the perils and promises of knowing people from that articulated in the century’s great psychological novels. Turning attention from character, plot, and perspective towards questions of voice, rhythm, and figure allows us to ask different questions about the ways in which experiences of knowing are variously stirred and stymied by reading – and to reflect on what these experiences have in common with knowing a person.

My second book project traces the broad cultural debate, stretching across the nineteenth century, about the uses of indistinctness in art. Beginning with John Ruskin’s spirited defence of Turner’s painting, I show how arguments about the expressive potential of blurriness came increasingly to centre on poetry, which proved an indispensable testing-ground for emerging questions about the nature of perception, representation, and imagination. Disclosing surprising affinities between poets from Tennyson and Swinburne to Carroll and Field, this study asks what resources indistinctness offered to Victorian writers, artists, and thinkers.

At Corpus, I teach across three ‘period’ papers, covering literature of all kinds from 1800 to the present day, as well as the first-year paper on the theory and practice of criticism. For the Faculty, I teach the third-year special option ‘Writing Lives’ and give lectures on the philosophy of literature and nineteenth-century writing about art.

Selected Publications

‘Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader’, in Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies, eds. Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 73-87.

‘Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter’, introduction to special issue of Victorian Poetry on Re-encounters, eds. Dominique Gracia and Fergus McGhee, vol. 61, no. 2 (2023), pp. 133-42.

‘Rossetti’s Giorgione and the Victorian “Cult of Vagueness”’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3 (2021), pp. 279-95.

Winner of the Richard D. Gooder Prize 2020.

‘Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness’, Review of English Studies, vol. 71, no. 300 (2020), pp. 413-32.

Winner of the Review of English Studies Essay Prize 2019.

‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Déjà Vu’, Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 1 (2019), pp. 61-84.