My research ranges across the poetry and drama of early modern England. I am especially interested in the relationship — notoriously difficult — between poetry and philosophy, and in the kinds of philosophical thinking that poetry of this period can do. Before coming to Oxford, I spent two years as a Lecturer at St Andrews, and three years as a Research Fellow in Cambridge, where I also did my PhD.
My first book, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Based on my doctoral thesis, this took its cue from five anthologies, all printed between 1599 and 1601, which featured excerpts from Shakespeare alongside other contemporary writers. Guided by the passages they chose, I presented a new account of Shakespeare’s first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (published in 1593) to Hamlet (published in 1603). At its heart, this was an experiment in using book history and the history of reading to help read Shakespeare more closely, with an eye to the moments that looked especially extractable to his early readers.
I still spend lots of my time thinking about Shakespeare. Recent work in this line includes an introduction to his final tragedy Coriolanus—coming out in 2026 with the New Oxford Shakespeare—and a collection of essays on the 1601 Love’s Martyr, the mysterious anthology for which Shakespeare wrote his most mysterious poem, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’.
Since my first book came out, I have been at work on a second project, tentatively entitled What Is Metaphysical Poetry? This starts out from the style of seventeenth-century poetry often known as ‘metaphysical’ — a name that’s almost as old as the thing itself — and asks what, if anything, is metaphysical about it. Drawing on philosophy, theology, intellectual history, and critical theory, it explores the surprising affinities between poetry and metaphysics through readings of a variety of early modern poets, from Shakespeare and Donne to Cowley and Cavendish. This work has prompted recent essays in English Literary History and the Review of English Studies, and will eventually result in my second monograph.
Alongside these projects, I am also thinking about rhyme and history in Samuel Daniel, obvious acrostics in George Herbert, and the global reach of the early modern Baroque. I am one of the people editing Richard Barnfield’s poetry for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Beyond the early modern, I have broader (and more inexpert) interests in: poetics and literary criticism; Marxist social, economic, and aesthetic theory; psychoanalysis; classical music; and the German philosophical tradition, from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno.
