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 teach and write about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In 2026, I was a guest on the BBC's In Our Time, discussing the play Henry IV, Part One.

I also work on the relationship between humans and oceans. Sometimes, this second interest overlaps with the first: I have written more than once Shakespeare's seas, 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), examines the significance of images and intuitions of oceanic depths in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. 

My work on the oceans also moves beyond the English Renaissance, 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 have, in addition, co-authored a book entitled The Seabed: A Human and Literary History, which is in production at the University of Chicago Press (publication 2026), and alongside Killian Quigley and Charne Lavery I have 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.

Postgraduate Research Supervision

I currently supervise PhD projects on: anger in Shakespearean comedy; the politics of Shakespeare's first tetralogy; knowledge of the ocean from 1600-1750; Victor Hugo and Channel Islands literature; anticipation and Shakespearean drama; and the significance of embodiment in scientific research. 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); household fools on and off the Shakespearean stage (PhD); female saints in medieval and Renaissance theatre (PhD); language and power in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (MPhil); and Shakespeare and dreams (MPhil).

I would welcome inquiries from anyone looking to conduct postgraduate research in oceanic studies, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, or the environmental humanities.