My first monograph (currently under consideration for publication) examines the mutual influences of Egyptology and literary culture across the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, in the wake of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In this project I conceive of a culture that at once encompasses Egyptological writing, popular forms of fiction, as well as works of ‘high modernism’, from the writings of archaeologists such as Howard Carter, through to the fiction and poetry of figures as diverse as H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Sigmund Freud, H. P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde and H.D. It also brings into conversation the physical books published by authors and Egyptologists alike, establishing the complex relationships between these objects as products of Egyptological study and the objects of Egyptological study themselves: artefacts often housed in museums, and sometimes in the private collections of these very authors.
I am also interested in science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly when it is seen to intersect with contemporary ideas about the supernatural or occult. I have published on the intersection between electromagnetic radiation and texts with ancient Egyptian subject matter, establishing the quasi-alchemical ways in which depictions of electrical phenomena and X-rays are presented as emblematic of magical lore of the ancients, and, simultaneously, the pinnacle of modern scientific understanding. I am currently researching other scientific areas in which these parallels can be traced: in psychology, and in the development of photographic technologies.
I have recently published on supernatural fiction set in Egyptian hotels, the intersection between the fairy-tale genre and mummy fiction in the late nineteenth century, and fictional representations of the ghost of Oscar Wilde. Forthcoming publications address the imagery of jewels and precious materials in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as photographic technologies, spiritualism and psychical research in Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.