My main current research project is on biblical poetry in Middle English. I held an AHRC RDE fellowship ‘Rewriting the Bible: Medieval Poems and Modern Audiences’ from spring 2024 to autumn 2025, which included staging of a performance of one poem, ‘The Life of Job’, at Winterbourne Medieval Barn in June 2025. There are two films about the project available on YouTube: one a recording of the play, and one a ‘making of’ documentary.  Please get in touch if you have any questions: I hope these recordings can be used in teaching and to encourage further medieval play performances at heritage sites!  Elisabeth Dutton and I wrote an article about it for Medieval English Theatre 47 (2026), available open access.

I am currently (2026) completing work on a new edition of biblical poems, including ‘The Life of Job’ for TEAMS Middle English Texts Series.  This follows on from my study of 6 biblical poems, including the Gawain­­-poet’s Patience and Cleanness, Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition, which was published in 2021 by Boydell and Brewer.  I have also published a few articles on this subject, including one in New Medieval Literatures 18 on ‘The Life of Job’.  To round off this major project, I am planning to publish some research on how popular biblical poetry influenced Piers Plowman.

My PhD investigated Chaucer's presentation of love and marriage relationships in relation to their social historical context, approached through letter collections and advice literature. It was published as Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012).  I continue to be broadly interested in the literature of medieval Britain and its social and cultural contexts.

I am also interested in the cognitive aspects of how readers make sense of narratives.  I gave a presentation to Malory 550 conference in August 2019 on how this might be a fruitful approach to Malory’s Morte, now published in Arthurian Literature, and plan to do more work in this area.  Another current interest is the medieval cultural history of the Somerset levels, especially in relation to King Alfred.

I am the Deputy Education Director for the School of Humanities, with responsibility for student experience. In 2026/7 I will also be teaching and convening Literature 1150-1550, and contributing to units including Chaucer and Chaucerians and Technologies of the Text.  I currently supervise 6 PhD students working on a range of projects.