Research interests

All of my research interests are in the broad area of Modern and Contemporary Literature and are informed by Environmental Humanities perspectives. I have published widely on ecocriticism, eco-poetry, island literary studies and nature writing. I co-authored  Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press, and my first sole-authored monograph, Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago was also published in 2022 in the Rowman and Littlefield ‘Rethinking the Island’ series. 

I have recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of English investigating the representation of farming in the rural and nature writing of the long twentieth century. I am currently completing the resulting monograph, The Pen and the Plough.  I am also a writer of creative non-fiction and co-edited and contributed to the diverse collection of nature writing Gifts of Gravity and Light: A Nature Almanac for the 21st Century, with an Introduction by Bernardine Evaristo (Hodder and Stoughton, 2021). I am a lecturer in Liberal Arts and English.

Teaching

I teach on the Liberal Arts units, ‘The Art of Writing’, ‘Experiencing the Aesthetic’ and ‘The Public Role of the Humanities’, and on two units of the English MA: ‘Literature and the Environment: Diverse Perspectives’ and ‘Writing in the Elements’.