My primary research activities are cross-disciplinary with a strong emphasis upon exploring links between textual, artistic and material cultures in England in the medieval and early modern periods. For the last few years I have been developing related projects on the large and, for the most part, unstudied body of vernacular inscriptions produced in England between the Conquest and the Tudor reformations. These are, essentially, texts produced for display in public and domestic contexts and the corpus extends to thousands of inscriptions in a host of languages, mostly English but also various kinds of insular French, Cornish, Welsh, Dutch, and Hebrew. Much of my work is focused on the art and devotional cultures of the English parish church.
Latterly, I have also been working on projects relating to writings of and about the First World War and have particular interests in the work of Herbert Read, Frederic Manning and their contemporaries, and of modern writers such as Peter Whelan and Susan Hill.
Research groups
I am active in the research networks that bring together Birmingham medievalists in the College of Arts and Law, including the Centre of Study of the Middle Ages.