I’m originally from Swansea, which is where I also studied for my BA, MA and PhD.

Between 2012 and 2017 I was the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Director of Research. I simultaneously held the John Anderson Research Leadership Professorship of English at the University of Strathclyde, 2012-15, and have been a Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities since 2015. I joined Strathclyde following time as an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Assistant (2006-7) working on a project at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales, a Vice Chancellor’s Future Research Leader Lecturer (2007-9) and Senior Lecturer (2009-11) in English at the University of Liverpool, where I also served as Director of Postgraduate Research for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (2008-2011).

Honours and awards

Education and qualifications

University of Wales (Swansea)

2005:                     Ph.D in English

2002: M.A. in English (Distinction)

2001: B.A. in English (First Class)

Professional memberships

• Elected Fellow of the English Association (2012)

• Member of the British Association for Victorian Studies (2002)

Academic positions

2012-2017:                      Director of Research, Arts and Humanities Research Council

2015-2017:                      Visiting Professor in English, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde

2011-15:                          John Anderson Research Leadership Professor in English, University of Strathclyde

10/2009-01/2011:             Senior Lecturer in English, University of Liverpool

06/2008-01/2011:             Director of Postgraduate Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool

06/2007-09/2009:             Lecturer in English, School of English, University of Liverpool; appointed under the Vice Chancellor’s Future Research Leaders scheme

02/2006-05/2007:             AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of English, University of Liverpool

Speaking engagements

Since 2005 I have delivered more than 35 keynotes/invited papers at conferences and research seminars. In 2017 my most recent engagements included:

• Keynote Lecture ‘Living (in) the Library’, Keynote lecture, Nineteenth Century Matters Public Engagement Training Day, Chawton House Library/British Association for Victorian Studies/British Association for Romantic Studies

• Guest Lecture ‘Every Limit is a Beginning as well as an Ending: On Leadership and the Arts and Humanities’, Bonnington Leadership Programme, Lancaster University

• Keynote Lecture ‘Terms of Engagement: On the Public Place of the (Neo)Victorians’, VINS: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Network, University of Malaga

• Keynote Lecture ‘Kissing Cousins, or Consuming Consanguinity: The Bodily Economics of Incest in Victorian Pornography’, Assuming Gender Symposium, Cardiff University

• Keynote Lecture “He shall prick that annual blister / Marriage with a deceased wife’s sister”: Punch, Gender and the Dead Wife’s Sister Act’, Punch and Women Conference, Institute of English Studies/Kings College London

Committees and reviewing

Current/recent selected international appointments

2012-2017: Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Network Board Member; Chair of Knowledge Exchange Strategy Group

2012-2017: Governing Board member, EU Cultural Heritage Joint Programming Initiative

2014-2017: Advisory Board member, AHRC Copyright and IP in the Creative Economy China Centre

2015-present:              International Advisory Board, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University

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On leaving my civil service post at the AHRC at the end of April 2017, I granted myself a period of self-funded research time. This has primarily involved returning to substantial projects the completion of which was incompatible with my Director role. Foremost among these has been the draft of a monograph on Incest in British Literature and Culture, 1835-1908. The book explores the significance of a wide range of cultural discourses concerning incest in the period. The selection of such specific dates demarcates this text as a study of the particular concerns raised within intellectual, theological, political and artistic communities following the prohibition of a man’s marriage to his dead wife’s sister resulting from the Marriage Act of 1835 and up to, and including, the passing of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907 and the Punishment of Incest Act in 1908. Between the parliamentary acts of 1835 and 1908, Victorian culture and society was witness to an array of encounters with the spectre of incest, be it in the form of sermons, pamphlets and speeches to parliament (which is estimated to have debated the issue on average every 2 years between the 1830s and 1900s) or the fields of literature, pornography, evolutionary science, eugenics, drama, music, satire and the visual arts. This book provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which incest came to act as a signifier for a number of divergent social and cultural debates in the period.

I am also finishing a short monograph entitled A Celibate Duet: Spectral Singularity & Singular Ho(l)mes. This will bring together two connected chapters framed on the cultural debates concerning celibacy and bachelorhood at the turn of the century. Related to themes of social purity, the figure of the New Woman and her political counterpart, the suffragette, and newly re-fostered debates about the male Dandy’s place in society, culture and aestheticism in particular, these public discussions concerned the appropriateness of male morals, female bodies and the intersections (or, in this case, non-intersections) between them. In the case of men there remains a reluctance, partly traceable to the Victorian period itself, to create a sustained account of the single man, the celibate male, in the same way that such narratives have been formed about the single woman.

Both these book projects mark a return to my previous work on gender, sexuality, identity and cultural forms in the (late-)Victorian period.

I also have further work on neo-Victorianism either forthcoming or under review with journals.

My current research interests include:

• Victorian literature and culture, especially the fin de siècle
• contemporary fiction, particularly women’s writing
• adaptations of the nineteenth century in contemporary culture and society, specifically Neo-Victorianism
• gender, sexuality and identity from the Victorian period to the present

I have plans for future projects in relation to Victorian cultural and knowledge organisations in the 21st century; the current ‘autobiocritical turn’ in literary and cultural studies; and notions of credit and indebtedness.

I welcome enquires from potential doctoral and postdoctoral researchers with plans to develop projects in any of these areas.