I am an Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture and Interim REF Coordinator (UoA27) in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. I joined the University of Portsmouth in 2007, having previously lectured at Cardiff University.

I am an executive committee member of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and an advisory board member of the journal Victoriographies (EUP).

My research centres on nineteenth-century literature and culture, with a particular focus on food, hunger and practices of consumption.

I am currently writing a mongraph on Hunger and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Culture. This builds on my previous work, A History of Food in Literature from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (co-authored with with Joan Fitzpatrick - Routledge, 2017), a comprehensive critical overview of food and related themes in literary and cultural texts from the medieval period to the twenty-first century.

I have also published articles on topics including famine, fasting, taste and spaces of consumption in journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Neo-Victorian Studies and The Yearbook of English Studies.

An additional research interest of mine is the history and culture of celebrity. I am currently co-editing a volume on Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century with Barbara Straumann (University of Zurich) and Sandra Mayer (Austrian Academy of Sciences).

Previously, I was the lead researcher on ‘Celebrity, Citizenship and Status’, an interdisciplinary project that examined the intersections between celebrity and civic cultures in both historical and contemporary contexts. I previously published in this area (together with Páraic Finnerty and Anne-Marie Millim) in Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), a co-authored book that emerged out of the HEIF-funded project ‘Tennyson's Celebrity Circle’.

 
PhD Supervision

I would welcome proposals from prospective postgraduate research students relating to my research interests.

I currently co-ordinate the Level 6 modules 'The Gothic' and ‘Consuming Fictions: Food and Appetite in Victorian Culture’ on the BA English Literature. I also teach on the MA Victorian Gothic.

I have previously supervised a variety of MRes projects and PhD projects, including on Black celebrity in the nineteenth century; Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography and the archival imagination; and the ageing female body in Victorian culture.

I am currently supervising PhD projects on Gypsies in the literary and cultural imagination; Victorian and neo-Victorian fairy tales; and Emma Dent, collecting and celebrity.

I am happy to take calls and emails from the media relating to my research. Please email [email protected] or telephone 023 9284 2175.

Interested journalists can also contact the University's Media and Communications team for support and advice on all media engagement, including out of hours.