I am a specialist in Old English poetry, though my interests are wide-ranging and include also Old Norse and Middle English poetry and prose. Much of my work is situated between the medical and environmental humanities, investigating how human bodies relate to their surrounding environments. I am currently working on a study of play and playfulness across Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse texts.

Before coming to Bristol in early 2024, I was a Stipendiary Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge (2017–2019), and Simon and June Li Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019–2023). I have also held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Seville, and Yale University.

The first phase of my research career focused on how  humans are drawn into intimacy with their environments in their experience of ageing. My first monograph, The Life Course in Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2024) explores depictions of ageing in Old English verse. It emphasises how human life courses are represented as fluid, variable, and contingent, interweaving with the life courses of objects, animals, and communities. I also co-edited Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Brill, 2022) with Thijs Porck (Leiden University). Like my monograph, this volume foregrounds entanglements between human and nonhuman lives, but from a more interdisciplinary perspective.

I have published on Old Norse eddic dialogues in Scandinavian Studies and Old Norse Poetry in Performance, ed. Brian McMahon and Annemari Ferreira (Routledge, 2022). Within the world of Middle English, I have published in The Library on the subject of the manuscript contexts of the late fifteenth-century ‘Winchester Anthology’,  and on age identities in Old and Middle English poetry for the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. My work also appears in The Review of English Studies, English Studies, Neophilologus, Notes and Queries, and elsewhere. 

I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students. I am currently supervising one PhD student, Laura Welsh, who is working on the language of eternity in Old and Middle English.