Teaching Information

I have been teaching at Bristol since the early 1990s, but have also been a lecturer, associate and assistant professor since that time at, respectively, the University of Newcastle, Japan Women's University, Tokyo, and ICU, Tokyo. (I am glad to give advice - and encouragement - to anyone thinking of going to Japan to lecture or teach.)

At present I am the Programme Director for the intercalated BA in Medical Humanities.

Recently taught courses include:

• Approaches to Poetry
• Approaches to Shakespeare
• Literature 2: 1500 to 1700
• Rudyard Kipling
• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Literature and Medicine
• MA in English Literature: Shakespeare, and Modern and Contemporary Poetry pathways.

I would be happy to supervise PhDs in the areas of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Kipling.

Research

My main areas of research interest are Shakespeare, English Renaissance Literature, Literature and Medicine and, increasingly, Kipling. Some representative publications include Edmund Spenser's Shorter Poems: A Selection (London: Everyman, 1998), Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 'Shakespeare and the Great War' (in the Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry 2007), 'Kipling and Creativity', Essays in Criticism, 62.3 (July 2012), King Demos and His Laureate: 'Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden," Transatlanticism, and the Newspaper Poem', Media History (2014), Hamlet: 'The Critical Backstory' (in Hamlet: A Critical Reader, Arden, 2016), A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

Some keynotes and invited papers include 'Shakespeare, Jonson and Friendship' (London Shakespeare Seminar, University of London, 2010), 'Multi-disciplinary Study: The Case of Kipling' (ICU, Tokyo, 2010), '"The Absent-minded Beggar": A Case-History of a Fund-raising Campaign of the South African War' (Voluntary Agency History Society, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 2010), ' "That trunk of humours": Shakespeare, Galen and Friendship' ('Shakespeare and Early Modern Emotion' Conference, Andrew Marvell Centre, Hull 2011), 'The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette': Kipling, Newspapers, and Poetry' ('Yeats and Kipling: Retrospectives, Perspectives' Conference, Delhi, Rajkot and Shimla, 2015).

I organized a Special Session at the 2015 MLA on 'Newspapers as a Poetic Medium, 1880-1900', and the research seminar on Hamlet at the International Shakespeare Association's World Shakespeare Congress in 2016.