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Degree(s)

PhD (University of Cambridge); MPhil (University of Cambridge); BA (University of Cambridge)

Research interests

My research is chiefly concerned with 20th-century poetics, with a special emphasis on the work of W. S. Graham. I’ve written variously about Graham’s domestic relationships, his sense of elegy, vocalic collage, and the phenomenologies of reading. Some other areas of interest currently include: theories of close reading; Samuel Beckett’s self-allusiveness; Christina Rossetti’s poems for children; Muriel Spark’s poetic realities; and modernist editorship. I’m currently working on a project of lyric evasiveness. 

Teaching Interests

My Part 1 teaching centres on modern/contemporary literature and practical criticism. I’m currently running classes on practical criticism and prose, as well as context classes for 1830-present day. For Part II, I teach for Lyric, History and Theory of Literary Criticism, Prose Forms, and Contemporary Writing. I’ve supervised a variety of dissertations, including (but not limited to): Emily Dickinson’s negative theology; fashion in Stevie Smith; Frank O’Hara and Thom Gunn; Christopher Isherwood and inter-war close reading. 

Publications 

‘W. S. Graham’s Already Made Voices’, Textual Practice, Volume 38, Issue 9 (2024) 

‘In Parenthesis’, review of Anna Mendelssohn: Speak Poetess, New Left Review/Sidecar (2024)  

‘Kafka’s Sentence’, review of Franz Kafka: Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin (Penguin) &. 
Karolina Watroba: Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Profile Books), The London Magazine, August/September 2024 

‘Certain Skies’ (with Thomas Fraser), CounterText, Volume 10, Issue 1 (2024) 

‘‘Yours truly saying with an invisible voice’: W. S. Graham’s Smalltalk’, Critical Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 4, (2023) 

‘The Art of Afterlife’, review of David Nowell Smith: W, S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object, (OUP), PN Review 269, Volume 49 Number 3 (2023) 

‘Alone, Ness: W. S. Graham to Nessie Dunsmuir’, Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 51, Issue 4, (2022)