• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature
• early modern psychology
• early modern representations of grief 
• gender
• the history of the emotions, including shame, disgust, lovesickness and desire
• revenge tragedy from the classical period to the present day
• early modern intellectual and medical history
• the relationship between grief and artistic creation 
• early modern cognition and visual distorations / hallucinations

My main interests are in early modern literature (particularly drama) and early modern psychology / the history of the emotions. My current project focuses on grief in early modern literature, asking in what contexts grief could be seen as meaningful and productive.  As part of this project, I organized the workshop 'Good Grief: Historical Perspectives on the Regulation of Mourning' with Naomi Baker. I am part of Bristol's 'Grief Cluster' and am working on the project, 'An Aesthetic Realisation of Embodied Grief in Fiction Film', with Jimmy Hay. 

I am also interested in early modern visual distorations / hallucinations and the complex ways in which early modern writers conceptualise the relationship between seeing, feeling, imagining, and remembering. As part of this interest, I organized a panel with Eric Langley (UCL) on ‘Vision and Emotion’ at the 2016 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). I am the co-editor of a book with Fiona McHardy, Revenge and Gender from Classical to Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and have written on a range of other topics, including: shame, misogyny, menstruation, and cruentation.

My book, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern Literature (OUP, 2008) analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and poses wider questions about gender and identity; it explores the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and how Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy. Focusing on writers such as Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Ford, and Davenant, the book considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), arguing that female lovesickness is a species of melancholy which can be depicted not only as a passionate illness which degenerates into madness, but also as a spiritual and cerebral affliction. 

I am on the Board of Directors for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol and enjoy participating in Public Engagement activities. I organized the Lewis Fry Memorial Event, ‘Remember Me: Shakespeare’s Cultural and Artistic Legacy’, and was interviewed on the BBC Radio3 Sunday Feature, ‘Still Bill’. I also write an occasional blog for the Huffington Post.

I am currently the Director of Education for the School of Humanities. 

Teaching

I have experience of teaching from 1500 to the present day. I teach on the MA in English Literature, on the units Renaissance Literature: Text and Context and Intertextual Shakespeare.

I would welcome PhD proposals on any aspect of early modern drama and the history of the emotions, especially those which engage with my own research in some way.