Personal profile

Research interests

My research interests are in premodern (late-medieval and early-modern, c. 1350-1700), Scottish and English literatures, especially poetry and poetics. As a practisioner of book-history, I am interested in the intersections between the book as material text and as literary artefact. I also continue to be engaged with Digital Humanities projects. Over the last year I have also become active in the spatial humanities: for instance the relationship between literature and geography, and how literary texts frame our experience of space and place. 

I am especially busy with two current projects: in 2023/24 I held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for a project called Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland. This will result in a book with chapters on e.g., 'Wild Places'; 'Travelling Places', and 'Place and Nation'. A supporting web resource (Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland) produced in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland contains mini-editions of Scottish poems alongside historical maps. 

With Steven Reid and Sìm Innes (Glasgow), I completed a British Academy Small Grant funded, proof-of-concept database and research project, the Literatures of Older Scotland Database (LOSD), a digital first-line index of Scottish poetry in Scots, Latin, and Gaelic. We are currently planning to move to a much more ambitious resource of this kind. 

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 Peter McCullough, on the Textual Companion volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (c. 2025/6). With Noah Millstone (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 river poetry, Scottish renaissance lyric, book illustration, seventeenth-century Scottish miscellanies, and the impact of Scots poetics on early-Stuart English literary culture.

I co-founded (2015) and now co-convene the Early Modern Studies Research cluster at Bristol.  

Research Supervision

I would be delighted to supervise a PhD in any of the areas outlined above in my research interests: English and Scottish late-medieval and early modern poetry and poetics; the spatial humanities (literature and space/place; literature and the environment); book-history (including editing, manuscript studies), and Digital Humanities. Don't be shy: please get in touch!

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 was an external examiner at the University of Edinburgh; member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and sat on an advisory panel for a major upcoming exhibition at the British Library. I have peer reviewed publications for, e.g., Oxford University Press, Manchester University Press, Routledge, Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Scottish Literary Review, Studies in Scottish Literature, and more.

Research Groups and Themes

  • Centre for Medieval Studies

Keywords

  • Poetry
  • Renaissance culture
  • place and space
  • Scotland
  • Britain
  • Jacobean
  • Early Modern History
  • Book history
  • editing
  • bibliography
  • manuscripts
  • early print
  • James VI/I
  • Stuart monarchs
  • Lyric
  • Form

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