I'm an Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. 

I currently serve on the Executive Committee of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), the Board of Directors of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP), and the Advisory Board 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.

Recently, I have served as co-investigator on the British Academy funded project, 'Young Women and Body Image', together with Helen Ringrow and Stephen Pihlaja. My contribution to the project focused on body image in historical media targeted at young women, from the late C19th - C20th.

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. 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.