Emma’s first book, Writing St Guthlac of Crowland, Medieval to Modern (Boydell and Brewer, 2026), is a literary history of St Guthlac of Crowland, the demon-battling bird-whispering hermit of the early medieval Fens. The book’s radically longitudinal span covers Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Latin texts, as well as texts by modern and contemporary writers such as John Clare, Charles Kingsley, David Jones and Graham Swift. Writing St Guthlac is interested in how material landscapes affect their literary manifestations, and how the trajectories of literary histories are informed by varied contexts and even more varied readers. Articles from the wider project have appeared in the John Clare Society Journal (2022) and Medieval Ecocriticisms (2023).
Emma’s next major project focuses on the reception of medieval material in the cultural productions of queer women writers (inclusively defined) in the twentieth century, and is therefore interested in queer medievalisms, women's writing and the biases of previous literary histories. Initial work from this project, analysing Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and the work of pageant master Gwen Lally (1882-1963), has been published in Studies in Medievalism (2025).
Emma has an additional interest in Middle English alliterative verse and is currently working on place-based approaches to The Destruction of Troy, a Romance hailing from late medieval Lancashire, together with its single manuscript witness (Glasgow MS Hunterian V 2.8), as well as its early modern readers.
As an enthusiastic teacher of medieval texts, Emma also has an ongoing interest in medieval pedagogy. Her pedagogical work has appeared in the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland Newsletter (2023) and Speculum (2026), the latter arising from a co-authored Old English textbook project, Was Hal! (in preparation), which introduces a communicative approach to medieval language learning.