About
I am director of the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanites (SIAH), where I support colleagues across the university and beyond in using arts and humanities methods to build interdisciplinary projects.
My own interdisciplinay work includes the Leverhulme-funded project Story Places, which brought together computers scientists and creative writers, mentoring a large language model for Love Letters with AI, AHRC Leadership Fellow on Invisible Mentors (2020-22), a collaborative project with ArtfulScribe and Winchester Poetry Festival exploring the role of mentoring in the creative industries, and Towns and the Cultural Economies of Recovery, a collaborative AHRC scoping project with the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and Historic England.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- embedding arts and humanities in interdisciplinary research
- mentoring and creative practice
- literary communities in modern culture
- poetry networks
- creative culture and social policy
Current research
I am currently developing a new project on queer lives and inclusion, with a focus on protecting queer communities and family-making in autocratic states.
Recent research includes work on mentoring practice in postwar and contemporary British poetry, the role that mentoring can have in the cultural and economic recovery of UK towns, and related policy work on supporting creative freelancers.
I enjoy thinking about poets that trouble critics and modes that trouble poets: I am the editor of Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and Drawings, and poetry by F.T. Prince, and have written a number of articles on poetry and whimsy. I also have research interests in contemporary British fiction, and music and modern literature. I would be interested in supervising students working in any of these areas.
I edited a book of essays on the poet F.T. Prince; other publications include Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2010), which won the CCUE 2011 book prize, and Postwar Literature: 1950-1990 (Longman, 2010).
I guest edited special issues on text-setting and libretti for Contemporary Music Review (Routledge), and international espionage fiction with Phyllis Lassner. I have also written articles on Emily Dickinson, Edward Lear, Elizabeth Taylor, and the pianist Harriet Cohen.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
I convene a number of modules which make connections between our discipline and the wider world, and between creative and critical practice: these include Creative Writing in Schools, a final-year module with schools placements, Animal Forms, which considers poetic form in relation to the human and the non-human.
I also contribute to our MA in Global Media and Publishing Management, a one-year specialist postgraduate programme which prepares students for work in the creative industries.
I have supervised 16 doctoral students to completion on a variety of critical and creative projects. I currently supervise projects on flirting in twentieth-century poetry, queer reparative practice and poetry, collage as literary history, and queer literature and animal relations. Former doctoral students I have supervised include Joanna Nissel, Joan McGavin, and Aiysha Jahan.
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
I completed my doctoral thesis at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to lecture at Bath Spa University and St Anne's College, Oxford before joining Southampton in 2008. During my time at Southampton, I have held posts including Research Fellow in Humanities (2009-10), Head of English (2017-2019), and Treasurer of University English (2018-2022).
I am currently the director of the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, and support colleagues across the university in arts and humanities-led interdisciplinary research. As part of this role, I represent the university on the board of the European Consortium of Humanities and Institutes (ECHIC), and Southampton's Place Partnership Board.
Prizes
- CCUE Book Prize (2011)