My research interests are in late-medieval and early modern literature (esp. poetry), and what today is called 'the history of the book', which in more old-fashioned terms would be called 'bibliography'. I am especially interested in the intersections between the book as material text and more literary questions. I work on the literary and book culture of Scotland; have an interest in the Digital Humanities; in editorial theory and practice; and an interest in the manuscript and print histories, and the poems and prose texts, of John Donne. 

My first book The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560-1625 (Oxford University Press 2016) won the Saltire Society's 'Scottish Research Book of the Year 2016' award. I am still at work, with Professor Peter McCullough, on the Textual Companion volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (forthcoming c. 2024). With Noah Millstone (Principal Investigator, Birmingham) I completed (in October 2018) the AHRC-funded project 'Manuscript Pampleteering in Early Stuart England'. Other ongoing and forthcoming work includes articles and book chapters on Elizabeth Melville, Scottish renaissance lyric, seventeenth-century Scottish miscellanies, and the impact of Scots poetics on early-Stuart English literary culture.

I am especially busy with two current projects (2022): with Steven Reid and Sìm Innes (Glasgow), I am working on a British Academy funded, proof-of-concept database and research project, the Literatures of Older Scotland Database (LOSD), essentially a digital first-line index of Scottish poetry in Scots, Latin, and Gaelic. The other project is a new book with working title Place and Poetry in Pre-Modern Scotland: a study about the representation of place (e.g., 'Wild Places'; 'Sacred Places'; 'Place and Nation') in poetic and other texts (e.g. chorography, maps, travel accounts), shaped in part by the insights of cultural geographical and place studies. 

With Kenneth Austin (History), Catherine Hunt (History of Art), and Richard Stone (History) I convene the Early Modern Studies Research cluster at Bristol.  

Editing / STS / Boards

From 2009 to 2014, I was co-editor (and co-founder) of the Open Access electronic Journal of the Northern Renaissance. I am also an Executive Member of Council (with a responsibility for all things digital) for the Scottish Text Society. I am an advisory board member for the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS) project, based at the University of Regina, Canada. I am currently an external examiner at the University of Edinburgh; member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and sit on an advisory panel for a major upcoming exhibition at the British Library. I have peer reviewed publications for Manchester University Press, Routledge, the Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Scottish Literary Review, Studies in Scottish Literature, and more.