My DPhil thesis, Preserving Old Possum: T. S. Eliot and the Making of Reputation, explored Eliot’s approach to – and anxieties about – matters of self-fashioning. It used the wealth of new material made available by recent editions of his work to argue that Eliot was not only an expert cultural marketer, but that he also used his poems to criticise the very strategies that were used to promote them.
In that project, I was interested more broadly in the ways in which writers consider both the practical and theoretical repercussions of textual preservation, including the economics of publishing, approaches to revision, and the arrangement of literary estates. Other writers I considered in relation to Eliot included Thomas Hardy, Henry James, E. E. Cummings, Philip Larkin, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.
My current project moves forward in time, to the second half of the twentieth century. I am interested in the path now frequently tread by eminent poets who become teachers of creative writing in university faculties. I want to find out what happens to their own writing when they are made to teach their craft to students, and how this combination of instruction and composition may alter our understanding of such ideas as influence, ars and ingenium, and late style.
For the English course at Oxford, I have taught Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (1830-1910), and Paper 4 (1910-Present), as well as supervising undergraduate FHS dissertations on various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. I also contribute to the teaching of visiting students, and in the past I have devised courses on modernism, poetry and philosophy, 20th century Christian writing, and Victorian novels.
