My research falls into two main areas. First, I work on Shakespeare and other English Renaissance dramatists. My first book, Dramatic Geography (Oxford University Press, 2017), examined English playwrights' representations of cultural encounter within the Mediterranean world, and I continue to write about theatrical space and dramatists' representations of geographical location: for example, I wrote the entry on 'Geography and Early Modern English Drama' for the Oxford Research Encylopedia of Literature and the chapter on drama and performance for The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies (Routledge, 2024).

I also work on the relations between humans and oceans. On occasion, this second interest overlaps with the first: I have written more than once Shakespeare's seas, most recently in a piece published in the journal Shakespeare Quarterly, and in September 2023 I co-organised an international conference on Shakespeare and the sea held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. My second monograph, Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2024), demonstrates how images and intuitions of oceanic depths in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries resonate with and adumbrate tragedy's concern with mystery and its generation of sublime horror.

My work on the oceans also moves beyond the English Renaissance, however, and it involves collaboration with a number of scholars both within and beyond literary studies. A volume of essays entitled Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading Writing, and Performing at Sea, co-edited with the historian Susann Liebich (University of Heidelberg), was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021, and I have recently co-authored, with Jimmy Packham (University of Birmingham), a chapter on whales in the nineteenth-century imagination for the collection Maritime Animals (ed. Kaori Nagai). Jimmy and I are, in addition, co-authoring a book provisionally entitled The Seabed: A Human and Literary History, which has been contracted by Chicago University Press and will appear in its 'Oceans in Depth' series (expected publication date: 2025), and alongside Killian Quigley and Charne Lavery I recently published a short piece on what humanities perspectives can bring to our understanding of the seabed and its future. My interest in the oceans has also led me to work alongside scientists -- in particular Kate Hendry (British Antarctic Survey), with whom I have collaborated on several ventures, including the supervision of four Masters by Research students working on the deep sea and seabed -- and alongside theatremakers, most recently on a project called The Hamlet Voyage (2022).

Postgraduate Supervision

I currently supervise PhD projects on: the social and theatrical history of early modern fools and clowns; rage in Shakespearean comedy; female saints in medieval and Renaissance theatre; nonhuman agency in Shakespeare's histories; knowledge of the ocean from 1600-1750; and Victor Hugo and Channel Islands literature. In addition to the four seabed-related research degrees noted above, I have supervised to completion projects on the faerie sign in medieval and early modern literature (PhD); the supernatural on the early modern English stage (PhD); Cyprus in the early modern English imagination (PhD); language and power in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (MPhil); and Shakespeare and dreams (MPhil).

I would welcome applications from anyone looking to conduct postgraduate research in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama; oceanic studies; literary/dramatic geography; or any combination of the three.

Teaching Information:

I currently teach the following units:

Undergraduate:

Shakespearean Tragedy (Year 3 special subject)

Literature and the Sea (Year 2 special subject)

Shakespeare (Year 2 Mid-scale unit, convener)

I also lecture on the first-year units 'Approaches to Poetry' and 'Critical Issues' and the third-year unit 'Celebrity Culture'. 

Postgraduate:

Renaissance Literature: Texts and Contexts

Hamlet: Text and Interpretation

Intertextual Shakespeare

Animal Planet

Literature and the Environment: Diverse Perspectives

I coordinate the dissertation for the MA in Environmental Humanities.

I was Director of Exams for English for the academic years 2014-15 and 2015-16, and again in 2023. I was the Faculty of Arts representative on the Alumni Foundation Committee from 2014-19, and I currently sit on the Management Group of Migration Mobilities Bristol, a Specialist Research Institute at the University of Bristol. 

Employment History:

I studied at Bristol and Oxford, and was awarded my PhD from Bristol in 2010. I then worked for two years as Teaching Fellow in Renaissance Literature at the University of Leeds before returning to Bristol in 2012.