English

I studied for a BA in English Language and Literature at Manchester University before moving to King’s College London for my MA and PhD. After teaching at King’s and at Reading University, I took up my post at Keele in 2004.

My main research interests are in Shakespeare and early modern literature and culture; editing and book history; childhood studies; literature and ageing; and literary style and genre. I am also interested in modern drama and in Shakespeare in performance/on film.

My current book project, provisionally titled The English Archaic: Outmoded Style in Early Modern Literature, 1590-1660, is a study of the literary, cultural and political functions in early modern texts of linguistic, poetic or dramatic styles that would have registered as outmoded or old-fashioned to audiences or readers. I am also working on editions of Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (for Arden Early Modern Drama) and James Shirley’s The Gentleman of Venice (for The Works of James Shirley, gen. ed. Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer, Oxford University Press). In addition, I am a Co-Investigator on the ‘Ages and Stages’ project, a collaboration between Keele and the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is funded by the joint research councils’ New Dynamics of Aging programme.

I currently teach on these undergraduate modules: Reading Literature (Level 1); Playing Parts: Studying Drama and Poetry (Level 1); The Age of Shakespeare and Donne (Level 2); The Drawn Sword: Literature and the English Civil War (Level 2); Twentieth-Century Novels into Film (Level 2); Shakespeare on Film (Level 3); and and Shakespearean Stages (Level 3).  I also teach and supervise students for the MA in English Literatures and the MRes in Humanities.  I have supervised or supervise PhD students working on seventeenth-century manuscript poetry and twentieth-century drama, and I would be happy to supervise research in any of my areas of interest.