Overview

My office hours for Term 2 are 11:00-11:30 on Mondays and 11:30-12:30 on Fridays; please email me to book a slot. Meetings can be in person (in Queens BG32c) or online (on Microsoft Teams) according to your preference. 

I'm a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, a published novelist, and a playwright, with a PhD in English. As a writer, I specialise in historical fiction, detective fiction, ghost stories, epistolary fiction, and LGBTQ+ fiction; in academical guise I'm an interdisciplinary practitioner whose research interests include queer theory, ecocriticism, Victorian medievalism, and the Pre-Raphaelites. 

My debut novel Nettleblack is a subversive and playful exploration of Victorian queerness, in which a nervous Welsh heir/ess runs away from a marriage plot, enlists in a ramshackle detective organisation, discovers herself anew in this chaotic new context, and - like so many flustered nineteenth-century protagonists - documents the experience in an epistolary novel. The novel is in dialogue with Victorian fiction and its inherent capacity for queerness (both explicit and conceptual), and explores the practicalities of articulating queer identity without modern terminology. It was published by Cipher Press in June 2022, and was a 2022 Book of the Year at the London Review Bookshop and Blackwells Manchester, and a Bookseller Fave of the Year at Waterstones Trafford Centre. 

I was awarded my PhD in English from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2023. My PhD, funded by the AHRC (TECHNE DTP) and titled 'Queer Reading the Work of Elizabeth Siddal', offered an alternative methodology for engaging with the works of the Pre-Raphaelite artist-poet and her contemporaries, inspired by queer theory, ecocriticism, close reading, and the creative-critical engagement of Siddal's own modus operandi. Whilst researching my PhD I was the 2020 Amy P. Goldman Pre-Raphaelite Fellow at the University of Delaware and Delaware Art Museum, and the Co-Director of the Royal Holloway Centre for Victorian Studies. Research from my PhD has been published in an open-access peer-reviewed article, in the edited collection Pre-Raphaelite Sisters (2022), and in numerous non-specialist essays and blogs. 

I am currently working on the sequel to Nettleblack, which will be published in 2024, as well as two other new fiction projects. 

I teach on a variety of English and Creative Writing modules, and will be convening EAS1045: The Essay: Form and Content. I have Associate Fellowship of the HEA. 

My pronouns are he/him or they/them. 

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