My research and teaching interests and experience are broad, and I have taught authors and topics across the span of 1500-1830 to undergraduates from many Oxford colleges. I have also taught on the graduate MSt course.
I am principally interested in early modern culture. Publications from the past decade or so include:
‘The Muses Garland (1603): Fragment of a Printed Verse Miscellany’, in Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, and Enrica Zanin (eds), The Early Modern English Sonnet: Ever in Motion (Manchester University Press, 2020).
An edition and critical analysis of a recently recovered four-leaf fragment of a late Elizabethan printed verse miscellany.
‘Two New Sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney?’, Sidney Journal, vol. 34 no. 2 (2016), 25– 48. Presenting the texts and testing a case for the attribution to Sidney of two previously unrecorded sonnets subscribed ‘S.P.S.’ in a recovered fragment of a printed verse miscellany, The Muses Garland.
‘Nicholas Breton, the Earl of Essex, and Elizabethan Penitential Poetry’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, vol. 56 no.1 (Winter 2016), 23–42.
Arguing for the reattribution of The Passion of a Discontented Mind (1601) to Nicholas Breton, and away from the earl of Essex. Close examination of textual evidence.
‘ “Idle Papers”: An Apology of the Earl of Essex’, in Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins (eds), Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier (Manchester University Press, 2013), 179–200.
A study of contexts for and the contents of the earl’s personal and political apologia, its scribal and print publication, censorship, and reception.
‘An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606)’, The Review of English Studies, NS vol. 61 (2010), 495–528.
The only full investigation to date of the origins, framing, and enforcement of the Jacobean statute prohibiting spoken profanity on stage.
