I am a co-founder and co-director of Bristol Common Press (est. 2021), a working historical print shop and practice-led research facility in the Faculty of Arts, with three nineteenth-century iron presses and a replica eighteenth-century wooden common press. I'd love to hear from prospective graduate students interested in pursuing practice-led PhD research using the facilities of Bristol Common Press (those PhDs needn't necesarily be in English studies!). 

My general interests are in the literature and politics of the late-Stuart and Hanoverian periods, bibliography and the history of the book. My monograph, Things That Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678-1743, is about the counterhistorical tendencies in the literature and propaganda of this period, focussing on fabricated conspiracies, failures, and speculations such as the Popish Plot, the Rye House Plot, and the South-Sea Bubble. My work deals a lot with anonymous and pseudonymous publications, but also engages with the works of such writers as Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Defoe, Swift, Mandeville, and Pope (the book concludes with an extended reading of the Dunciads). I am the co-editor (with Rebecca Bullard) of The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, Volume 1: The Early Plays (Pickering and Chatto, 2016). I was the textual editor for The Correspondence of John Dryden, ed. by Stephen Bernard (Manchester Univ., 2022). I have written journal articles and book chapters on Swift's Bickerstaff hoax, the warming-pan scandal of 1688-9, the arrest of Delarivier Manley after the publication of The New Atalantis in 1709, political poetic miscellanies, 'practical' satire of the eighteenth century, prose hoaxes, bites and shams, eighteenth-century utopias and urban and pastoral verse. I am currently working on a project investigating the relationship between 1680s news cultures and the later historiography of the revolution of 1688-89.  

I have supervised a PhD on the culture of secrecy and literary politics in England, 1687-1754 (Jingyue Wu) and am currently co-supervising theses on eighteenth-century representations of female violence and intimidation (Louise Bray) and the literary qualities of early modern ships' logs. I would be delighted to hear from prospective postgraduate students interested in my areas of research, or indeed in areas adjacent to them.