Contact
Expertise Summary
BA (Oxon), MA, PhD (York)
Areas of Expertise: Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature; Langland; Chaucer; Gower; religious identity and controversy; Reformation writing; connections between the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Teaching Summary
I teach on a range of modules at all levels, predominantly those about medieval literature, early modern literature and drama, and the history of the English language.
I teach on the first year core module, 'The Beginnings of English', and undergraduate modules on 'Chaucer and his Contemporaries', as well as lectures on modules such as 'Shakespeare and his Contemporaries on the Stage', 'Introduction to Drama', 'Shakespeare's Histories', and 'English Through Time'.
I offer a third year module on medieval visionary poetry: 'Dreaming the Middle Ages', and contribute to MA programs in medieval and early modern literature and drama.
Research Summary
My first book, on the appropriative tradition surrounding William Langland's Piers Plowman, was published early in 2011. I am now working on a second book, on forms of Protestant medievalism in the… read more
Selected Publications
Current Research
My first book, on the appropriative tradition surrounding William Langland's Piers Plowman, was published early in 2011. I am now working on a second book, on forms of Protestant medievalism in the sixteenth century. The project's focus is on literary history and religious change and identity, with specific reference to questions of reception, appropriation, and re-writing. The project includes work on particular authors (the reception and printing history associated with poets such as Langland, Chaucer, Gower) and more broadly on the various uses to which medieval texts, figures, and genres could be put across the period of the English Reformations.
Current areas of interest include: 'civic' orientated medievalism, particularly in the work of Thomas Heywood and Thomas Deloney; political citations and appropriations of Chaucer and Langland between 1590 and 1650, especially in terms of their use by Presbyterian and Parliamentary writers and their Anglican and Catholic opponents; prose re-writings of Boccaccio and Chaucer in the Elizabethan period, which often focus on the issue of Purgatory; the memorialization of religious difference during the English Reformation itself in a series of history plays, c. 1590-1613; Drayton's early verse and the medievalism of the Mirror for Magistrates Tradition; Romance, Magic and Anti-Magic in Spenser and Dekker; Anglo-Saxonism from Matthew Parker to the Shakespearian Stage.
Past Research
My research in the past has focused on major canonical poetry in Middle English, especially Langland and Alliterative Verse; Chaucer and Gower, and on the intersections between literature, literary history, and the writing of religious controversy across the period c. 1350 to c. 1600.
Future Research
I would be pleased to supervise PhD research connected with any of the areas of my research interests: Medieval Studies (especially the fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries); Tudor writing and the Reformation; The History of the Book during these periods.
Please get in touch if you are considering working on a connected topic.