My research focuses on British Romantic literature and on twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone writing.

Authors I have published on include William Wordsworth, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yiyun Li, and others. Topics I have written on include poetics and literary theory; literary ignorance; literature and suicide; literary posterity; letters and epistolary poetics, and others. 

My most recent books are The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (Cambridge UP, 2023), and the 6^th edition of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, with Nicholas Royle (Routledge, 2023). With Nicholas Royle I am also working on the second edition of This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (forthcoming, Routledge, 2024), and on a book on Elizabeth Bowen’s short fiction. I am currently writing a sole-authored monograph on Keats's letters with the working title John Keats and the Poetics of Letter Writing.    

Research Supervision

I am currently supervising or have previously supervised research students on a range of topics, including Wordsworth and education; Wordsworth’s spousal verse; Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book; Wordsworth the future; purity and intoxication in Keats; Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon; Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites; Romantic ‘last man’ literature; Bristol and the new Lyrical Ballads; De Quincey and reception; regional writing and nineteenth-century nation building; Jean Rhys and exile; Elizabeth Bowen and trauma; Yeats and ageing; modernist writers and boredom; science and technology in modernism; Wallace Stevens and literary theory; Don DeLillo and communication; Pat Barker and trauma; twentieth-century autobiographical writing; David Foster Wallace and embodiment; philosophical scepticism in David Foster Wallace; Samuel Beckett and transgression; haunted memories in Kazuo Ishiguro. 

I am happy to consider supervising prospective research students interested in working on a range of Romantic, and twentieth-century and contemporary writers and topics: please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research plans.