My research focuses on British Romantic literature and on twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone writing.

Authors I have published on include William Wordsworth, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yiyun Li, and others. Topics I have written on include poetics and literary theory; literary ignorance; literature and suicide; literary posterity; letters and epistolary poetics, and others. 

My most recent books are (as editor) The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (Cambridge UP, 2023) and, with Nicholas Royle, the 6th edition of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Routledge, 2023) and the second edition of This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (Routledge, 2024). I am currently writing a monograph on Keats's letters with the working title John Keats and the Poetics of Letter Writing; with Nicholas Royle, I am working on a book on Elizabeth Bowen’s short fiction. 

Research Supervision

I am currently supervising or have previously supervised research students on a range of topics, including Wordsworth and education; Wordsworth’s spousal verse; Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book; Wordsworth the future; purity and intoxication in Keats; Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon; Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites; Romantic ‘last man’ literature; Bristol and the new Lyrical Ballads; De Quincey and reception; regional writing and nineteenth-century nation building; Jean Rhys and exile; Elizabeth Bowen and trauma; Yeats and ageing; modernist writers and boredom; science and technology in modernism; Wallace Stevens and literary theory; Don DeLillo and communication; Pat Barker and trauma; twentieth-century autobiographical writing; David Foster Wallace and embodiment; philosophical scepticism in David Foster Wallace; Samuel Beckett and transgression; haunted memories in Kazuo Ishiguro. 

I am happy to consider supervising prospective research students interested in working on a range of Romantic, and twentieth-century and contemporary writers and topics: please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research plans.