I joined Royal Holloway as a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in September 2008. I also completed my MA studies, my PhD and Post-Doctoral Fellowship here at Royal Holloway. My Masters and PhD study were funded by full-time AHRC awards: I completed my PhD in March 2007. The post-doctoral award I held from 2007-2008 was funded by the Henry Moore Foundation.

I have worked on the interdisciplinary relations of literature and the visual arts in various guises, most recently with a book chapter on the politics of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and art for a new centenary collection of essays on the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I have worked on the areas of the Victorians and Italy (the topic of my AHRC funded PhD thesis) and have since published articles on poetics and politics and on the interrelations of sculpture and poetry, for which work I was awarded a two-year Henry Moore post-doctoral scholarship. My recent work has moved to consider the relation of pedagogy, aesthetics and epistemology in the Victorian period and my contracted monograph 'Those Who Can: Pedagogy and Activism in the Nineteenth Century' (Routledge Education) explores the ways in which the mantle of affect was passed from Art and Culture in the nineteenth century to the didactic and rhetorical forms of criticism and the lecture. The project addresses the dominance of the figure of the Victorian 'sage' or cultural commentator in the period and investigates the connections to education and the development of the teaching profession in the careers of such figures as Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold. I am also collaborating with colleagues from Brunel on an AHRC Leadership Award bid to commemorate the centenary of the Newbolt Report in 2021 through a series of workshops and events analysing the contribution of this first study of the teaching of English at all educational levels, but which also seeks to re-run Newbolt for the discipline of English in the 21st century: it is projected that the bid will provide buyout for myself and Professor Robert Eaglestone to lead a strand of the project on the teaching of English in universities in the 20th and 21st centuries.