Northumbria University

Faculty Member, English

Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

About

My research interests lie in English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am fascinated by the cultural, historical and political context of literary works and my work often seeks to understand literature's relationship to the broader Arts and to non-literary texts.

My doctoral research drew on poems, plays, prose fictions, early novels, pamphlets, life writing and the visual arts to chart a new history about the courtesan's centrality to English literary culture during the dynamic years of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. I am currently drawing on this research to write a monograph, provisionally entitled 'Telling Stories, Transforming Genres: The Courtesan's Role in English Literary Culture, 1660-1730'. This study examines the ways in which the courtesan was at the centre of shifts in dramatic taste in the period, including the flurry of classical tragedies produced in 1677, the popularity of city comedy in the late 1670s and early 80s, and the development of she-tragedy from the 1680s-1710s. It will also introduce new ways of thinking about the development of prose fiction, tracing how real life stories were transformed into fictions for the marketplace, and explaining how authorial interest in the courtesan derived from a fascination with the figure's own mastery of fictions. 

In recent years I have published a number of articles, including an examination of the posthumously-printed (and likely fraudulent) love letters of Aphra Behn, a survey of critical approaches to the eighteenth century letter as a genre, and a chapter assessing the influence of the notorious Duchess of Mazarin on Behn's œuvre. I have also worked as a researcher on two major-funded projects. From June 2011, I spent a year as the postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project, 'Court, Country, City: British Art, 1660-1735', run in collaboration between Tate Britain and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. I was based in the Pre-1800 Curatorial Team at Tate Britain, where I developed research on public sculpture of the period, with a focus on the cultural and political reception of statues of Queen Anne. Prior to this, I spent fifteen months in Oxford working as a researcher on the Leverhulme-funded project, 'The Digital Miscellanies Index', which is creating a freely-available database of the contents of hundreds of 18th century poetic miscellanies (http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/).

Contact Information