I joined the University in 2000, and worked initially in the School for Continuing Studies, which subsequently became the Centre for Lifelong Learning. I moved to the English Department in 2006.

Selected modules:

• Writing Revolutions, 1680–1830 (MA, module convenor)
• Discourse of the Passions: eighteenth-century sentimental writing (level H)
• Utopia and its Discontents (level H)
• Literature and the Asylum (level I/H)
• Introduction to Literature (level C)
• Generic Transformations, 1580–1780 (level I)
• From Romanticism to Modernism: English Literature 1800–1930 (level I/H)
• Literature of Selfhood: explorations of identity in narrative fiction from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century (level C)
• Literature in the Metropolis (urban fiction from London and New York) (level C)
• The Scottish Enlightenment: An Introduction (day schools)

I supervise MPhil and PhD students on a range of literary and cross-disciplinary subjects and would welcome applications in the following areas:

• Eighteenth-century literature and culture with respect to questions of national and personal identity
• Eighteenth-century aesthetic thought
• Utopian writing

My current research area is Anglo-Scottish writing and painting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (on such figures as James Thomson, Tobias Smollett, Allan Ramsay, James Macpherson, James Boswell, and Walter Scott). I examine the representation of personal and national identity in these writers and artists’ works. I am currently in the later stages of a monograph, Union and Identity Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation, 1730-1830 (Palgrave Macmillan), and am preparing a lengthy article on the depiction of Ossian in British Art. My next project will be a book on Utopian writing, Utopia and its Discontents (Continuum). I have held a number of post-doctoral fellowships and visiting scholarships, most recently at the Yale Center for British Art (2009).

Research groups

I am a member of the department's Restoration, Eighteenth Century, and Romanticism research group, and the College of Arts and Law impact action group.

I undertook in CLL a range of executive and administrative responsibilities, including chairing the Centre's research and projects committee, devising new programmes of study, and managing the part-time literary provision. I convene at present the department's the first-year Independent course, and the MA module, ‘Writing Revolutions, 1700-1832'. Externally, I provide assessments on the literary significance of eighteenth-century paintings to both commercial and public galleries.I am a member of BSECS (British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), serving on the executive 1999-2003; and  am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Conferences

I regularly deliver conference papers at in Britain, and occasionally abroad.

• ‘Macpherson, Ossian, and Homer’s Iliad’, in Ossian and the National Epics, ed. by Gerald Bär (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012)
• ‘James Thomson’s Picture Collection and British History Painting’, Journal of the History of Collections, 23 (2011), 153–64 (with a catalogue of Thomson’s pictures as an appendix)
• ‘Ossian and Ossianic Parallelism in James Barry's Works', Eighteenth-Century Ireland , 23 (2008), 94–120
• ‘Dark Interpreter: Literary Uses of the Brocken Spectre from Coleridge to Pynchon', Dalhousie Review, 87 (2007), 167–87
• ‘Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village: Past, Present, and Future', English 55 (2006), 123–40
• ‘Socratic Dialogue, the Humanities and the Art of the Question', Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 5 (2006), 181–98
• ‘James Thomson's The Castle of Indolence and the Allegory of Selfhood', The Cambridge Quarterly , 35 (2006), 327–44
• ‘“But cast their eyes on these little wretched beings”: The Innocence and Experience of Poor Children in the Late Eighteenth Century', New Formations , 41 (2001), 115–30
• ‘James Macpherson's Ossian and the Empire of Sentiment', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1999), 155‒71
• ‘Revolution in the Garden: English Literature in the Information Age', in Innovations in Teaching and Assessing English and Textual Studies (Cambridge: SEDA, 1999), 97‒120
• ‘Literature and Ethics: The Uses of English in Higher Education' in Proceedings of the Conference of the Higher Education Arts Network (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1998), 26‒37
• ‘Dombey and Son: Families and Commerce' and ‘Dombey and Son: Industry and Empire' in The Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. by Delia da Sousa Correa (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 136‒58, and pp. 159‒85