My research is mainly in 20th century Scottish and British literature and popular culture. Current research focuses on the First World War. I am working on a book, The First World War in Scottish Literature and Popular Culture, which is contracted with Oxford University Press. This follows on from articles I have published in The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (2013), the Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (2012, the International Journal of Scottish Literature (2010), and the Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (2007).
I have written and co-edited five books, The Scottish Poetry of the First and Second World Wars (2017) From the Line: Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945 (2014) (both with Roderick Watson); Scotland and the Nineteenth Century World (2012) and Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth Century Scottish Literature (2004) (both with Gerard Carruthers and Alastair Renfrew), and A Critical Difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism 1919-1928 (1998).
I have published essays on issues in Scottish literature and culture in a number of works, from the Oxford History of the Novel and the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism to the London Review of Books.
I am a member of the Strategic and Academic AHRC Peer Review Colleges and a member of the AHRC's COVID-19 expert peer review group and have sat on and chaired numerous grant panels for the council. I am a member of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Panel College. I participate in several networks, including the Scotland's Colony project at the University of Otago, the Universities Committee for Scottish Literarture, the Scottish Centre for Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies, and the War and Representation Network, and am a member of the Board of Editors of the Scotnotes in Translation series at Nanjing Normal University.
I have examined doctorates at the universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Kent, Strathclyde, and the University of the Highlands and Islands.