I'm a Research Fellow in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature. I'm currently working on poetic form in British abolitionist poetry, especially in relation to the rise and fall of the heroic couplet. I'm interested in how poems formed a critique of one of the worst excesses of commerce, chattel slavery, at the same moment that poetry itself was becoming a commodity for the first time. I want to explore that story by tracing the changing attitudes towards styles of rhyme in the period. Current work includes essays on William Cowper's blank verse, the perceived relation of rhyme to commercial cultiure in the eighteenth century, and the uses of the 'unheroic' form of the anapaestic tetrameter couplet in antislavery poetry.

I'm working on a book on poetry's role in the British abolitionism movement, and I continue to publish on Romantic form, especially in relation to poetic 'semblance': how poems speak about how the world seems to be, versus how it really is.

Publications

I received my B.A. from the University of Exeter, and my M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where I also taught for four years. I took up the role of Research Fellow in the School of English in September 2023, but I was previously a visiting Fleeman Fellow here in 2018.