Current and recent national research activity

In 1999 I co-created with Anne Janowitz (QMUL) the Enlightenment and Romanticism Reading Group, a seminar of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Joined by Elizabeth Eger (KCL) in 2001, we convened the group for 9 years, during that time hosting most of the significant national and international scholars working within the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In 2006 my PhD student Sherah Wells and I organised a visit of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigarary to Warwick. Professor Irigaray delivered a public lecture and gave a seminar to doctoral candidates in the English and Philosophy Departments and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender.

In Spring of 2010 in collaboration with Nadia Valman (QMUL) I curated a semester of the London Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar, at the Institute of English Studies. We brought together scholars working across the disciplines of English, history and cultural geography to address the topic 'Revisiting the Victorian East End'. Papers from the series and others on the theme have been published as the Winter 2011 issue of 19. www.19.bbk.ac.uk

In October 2011, in collaboration with psychoanalytic psychotherapist Janet Campbell, I created Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice, a seminar at the IES. Sponsored jointly by Warwick and the IES, this group brings together academics from English and other humanities and social science disciplines with clinicians to discuss psychoanalytic and cultural texts and ways of understanding the relations between them. The seminar takes a sabbatical in Autumn term 2013, and resumes in January 2014.

Since 2008 I have been an Independent Assessor for the Reviewing Committee of the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, which reports to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, Department of Culture, Media and Sport. I advise on the adjudication of the Waverley criteria in the proposed export of 19th century British women's manuscript and published literary texts.