My research centres around nineteenth-century fiction. I have two main areas of interest. The first is the relationship between literature, space, place, and architecture. I also work on the novel – its nature, development, and possibilities – and the global histories of reading. I was a trustee of the Dickens Society from 2021 to 2024 and serve on the editorial board of Dickens Quarterly. Much of my thinking brings me back to Dickens in some way or other.
I am fascinated by the ability of fiction to articulate urban and domestic experience. My first book, Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. It explores the significance of tenancy in the literary imagination: drawing on Dickens’s novels and journalism, it reveals how rented spaces (such as lodgings and boarding-houses) might complicate our understanding of the cosy Victorian home.
I continue to ask what happens when literary criticism and geography intersect. I am currently working on a project about nineteenth-century housing disasters. With colleagues across English, Geography, and History departments at Oxford and beyond, I co-lead a research network on cultures of rent, which has received funding from the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). You can find out more about the Rent Cultures Network here: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/rent-cultures-network.
My other project-in-progress asks what it means to feel at home in a book; it is about the practice of re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present.
