I work on nineteenth-century poetry and non-fiction prose, exploring their relations with visual culture, moral philosophy, and intellectual history (particularly aesthetics and the history of psychology). Rather than advancing from any pre-ordained theory or context, however, I believe the best criticism always begins from a perplexity arising from the text's own expressive and inventive qualities. I therefore have a particular commitment to close reading and its creative possibilities.
My first book project, Darklier Understood: Knowing Persons in Victorian Poetry, arises out of my thesis and traces the passionate, compromised quests to know people—oneself, one another, and God—in a wide range of Victorian poetry. From Robert Browning to Alice Meynell, poets across the period show how the failure to know people as surely, or as intimately, as we desire may produce a host of unsuspected possibilities and pleasures. Such writing asks how knowing others relates to knowing oneself, and to being known in turn—concerns which have typically been regarded as the preserve of the novel. Bringing close readings of poetry into conversation with contemporary essayists and philosophers (Emerson, Ruskin, Pater, Newman, McTaggart), this study builds on Stanley Cavell's work on language and scepticism to reveal a new dimension of Victorian moral psychology and literary creativity. I also show how poetic form offers distinctive resources to ethical reflection, expanding accounts of literature's ethical value beyond familiar claims bound up with narrative as well as more recent appeals to alterity. An article I have already published in this vein, ‘Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness’, was awarded the Review of English Studies Essay Prize in 2020.
My second book, The Art of Indistinctness, traces the broad cultural debate, stretching across the nineteenth century, about the uses of indistinctness in art. Forging new connections between aesthetics, psychology, visual culture, and literary form in the period, this study examines the various kinds of value (including moral value) placed upon indistinctness as a tool of artistic expression. Beginning with John Ruskin's spirited defence of Turner’s painting, I show how Victorian criticism thinks carefully and extensively about the conceptual and expressive potential of indistinctness, and how this discussion incubated and responded to formal innovation across the arts. I then relate these developments to nineteenth-century psychological inquiry into perception and states of reverie and daydream. My article ‘Rossetti’s Giorgione and the Victorian “Cult of Vagueness”’ trials some of these questions in relation to a single sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was awarded the Richard D. Gooder Prize for the best scholarly essay on the relations between literature and the arts in 2021. My article in Victorian Studies (‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Déjà Vu’) demonstrates how one might integrate close attention to literary form with the history of psychology, a key method for this project.
Further research interests include the functions of criticism, the Victorian reception of the Renaissance, and the essay as a literary form, all reflected in my recent work on Walter Pater (‘Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader’).
I have also edited a special issue of the journal Victorian Poetry which explores the theme of 're-encounter' from a wide range of interdisciplinary angles.
From September 2024, I will be Tutorial Fellow in English at Corpus Christi College and Associate Professor in the English Faculty.
Recent Conference Papers
‘Whistler and the Idea of Poetry’, Whistlerism: International Conference, University of Rouen Normandie / University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France (June 2024)
‘Pater the Inventor’, Walter Pater, ‘The Renaissance’, and Legacies of Aestheticism, Trinity College, Oxford (June 2023)
‘Criticism and Invention’, The Functions of Criticism, University of Cambridge (May 2023)
‘“All this hath been before”: Tennyson and Déjà Vu’, Victorian Resurrections, University of Vienna, Austria (September 2022)
‘Hardy, McTaggart, and the Romance of Knowing’, British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham (September 2022)
‘Pater’s Outlines: At the Edges of Thought and Feeling’, Sensations and Ideas, International Walter Pater Society Conference, Iuav University of Venice, Italy (July 2022)
‘Alice Meynell: Secrecy and the Sacred’, Truth, Mystery & Investigation, Midwest Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, Loyola University, Chicago, USA (May 2021)
At Corpus, I teach across three period papers – Prelims Paper 3 (1830–1910), Prelims Paper 4 (1910–present), and FHS Paper 5 (1760–1830) – as well as the theory and practice of criticism (Prelims Paper 1).
For the Faculty, I convened the third-year paper on life-writing with Prof Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in 2023-24. I am running a new course on 'Poetry and the Visual Arts' with Prof Matthew Bevis next year. I also give lectures on poetry, the philosophy of literature, and nineteenth-century writing about art.
I have supervised undergraduate and Master's dissertations on a range of nineteenth-century authors including Coleridge, the Brownings, the Spasmodic poets, Dickens, Eliot, Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Swinburne, and Michael Field.
