Research interests

My research is focused on eighteenth and nineteenth-century religious poetry, but I am broadly interested in how religion is figured and experienced in verse. I’m also also interested in the interrelationship between religion and ecology and its potential illumination by more-than-human (plant and animal) forms of consciousness. I'm a member of Critical Environments and the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature; and founded the research groups CoRAL Comparative Religions and Literatures in 2011 and PAW (Poetry at Warwick) in 2016.

My book Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press), for which I received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, was published in 2018. I'm currently working on Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work (with Mark Knight, Bloomsbury); and a new edition of the dialect poetry of William Barnes (with Tom Burton, Edinburgh University Press). Future projects include studies of kenosis and mysticism in nineteenth-century poetry; and the poetry of Peter Larkin.

Professional associations

• Associate, Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English
• Association for the Study of Literature & the Environment
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Associate Fellow of the English Association
• British Association of Romantic Studies
• British Association of Victorian Studies