Personal statement

I moved to Strathclyde in August 2016 after seven years at the University of Glasgow as lecturer and Senior Lecturer, following by three years as a Chair at the University of Stirling. My main research expertise is in Victorian literature and culture, particularly poetry and poetics, Scottish Victorian popular culture and literature, working-class writing, literature and religion, and literature and medicine. I also have growing research and teaching interests in children's literature from the nineteenth century to the present day.

In 2015-16 I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete a monograph on Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community. I have recently completed an anthology of Scottish Victorian newspaper verse, The Poets of the People's Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland (Glasgow: ASLS, 2016), and am currently CI on a Carnegie Collaborative Research Grant with the University of Glasgow, 'The People's Voice: Political Poetry, Song and the Franchise, 1832-1918'.