My research explores emotion, storytelling, performance and the body. My current book project focuses on fainting, gender and vulnerability on the early modern stage. It argues that swoons complicate assumptions about weakness and strength, offering insights into complex (and often conflicting) narratives of health, feeling and consciousness. Initially funded by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, the project draws on literary, medical and religious texts from Shakespeare’s England alongside present-day lived experiences of people with illnesses and disabilities that cause fainting.

This work has inspired public engagement activity, including SWOON!, a co-created exhibition of faints from across art and culture developed for the Being Human Festival. Visitor responses were woven into a final performance by my collaborators Kat Lyons and eden, returning the idea of fainting back onto the body itself. My faint research was also the subject of my three-minute thesis presentation, ‘The Art of the Swoon’, which won the University of Bristol competition in 2023 and was selected for both the national and the European Coimbra Group finals.

I am also involved with a variety of projects related to grief, creativity and community, as a Research Associate at the Bristol Centre for Grief Research and Engagement. I produce Good Grief Festival, a series of online and in-person events that aim to open conversations about grief and have engaged over 35,000 people. I have co-written articles on school grief education and a storytelling intervention for bereaved people, as well as co-creating public-facing resources on child bereavement and baby loss. I regularly collaborate with artists, theatre-makers and organisations on events, performances and publications. For example, I co-authored two zines to accompany She Said Jump’s The Guy in the Luggage Rack, and am now working with the theatre company to develop and evaluate DIRT!, an immersive and accessible show exploring climate grief. I convene the University of Bristol Grief Network, supporting research connections across disciplines and beyond.

I am a certified Diversity Ambassador after completing training with the Global Equality Collective. I have a particular interest in forms of grief that are often overlooked, including the complicated emotions that accompany long-term illness. I regularly guest write posts for Super Culture's blog. I also support enterprise and innovation at Bristol. I was part of the University's first cohort of Early Career Enterprise Fellows and am now an Enterprise and Innovation Champion.