My research reaches across eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature; it is critical, biographical, and editorial; it focuses on three main areas:
Arts of Place: Arts of Place is a cross-disciplinary research network, which I co-lead with Professor Alexandra Harris. It launched in October 2020 as a forum for new work on landscape and environment both within and beyond the University of Birmingham. It is a vibrant meeting point for graduates, academics, external specialists, and all those who care about what we make of our surroundings.
William Wordsworth and Romanticism: As a Wordsworthian, I am interested in the feelings and memories that become attached to specific environments and how they are captured and communicated through literature. I have published widely on various aspects of Wordsworth’s poetry and his significance in Romantic-period literary history.
Relationships between Verbal and Visual Arts: Another strand of my research brings together art history and literary criticism. My edition of The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family (Liverpool, 2021) is a foundation for exploring how relationships between writers, artists, and patrons helped reshape formal and generic trends in nineteenth-century poetry and landscape art. My current book project explores why the kinship between poetry and painting came under attack in the second half of the eighteenth century and how this changed the ways in which Cowper, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Austen, and Scott experienced and presented their local environments.