I am currently Director of TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. From this role has emerged a co-edited volume with Professor Robert Frodeman, to be published in 2027 by Oxford University Press, The Oxford Handbook of Knowledge Production and the Research University. The volume addresses a number of urgent questions which require us to reconsider the way universities function, including the challenges and opportunities posed by Big Tech and AI. My emerging areas of interest are the relationship between AI and Creativity especially within the context of European universities and cultural organizations; and Public and Community Engagement with Research, including a project with English Heritage, Poetry, Heritage, Community, which will culminate in a major spoken word festival for school students at the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities (summer 2026). . My other areas of research are eighteenth-century poetry (I am completing The Oxford History of English Poetry: The Eighteenth Century), political literature, and women's writing of the long eighteenth century. My most recent scholarly articles are on Swift and Walpole, and on eighteenth-century women and memory, with a particular focus on Irish women's writing, especially the circle around Swift. This has included articles such as 'What the Women of Dublin did with John Locke', and 'Laetitia Pilkington and the Mnemonic Self'. .
I teach the period papers which cover literature written between 1550 to 1830, and supervise dissertations a topics across the period 1660-1830. I also have teaching interests in American Literature between 1680 and 1900, as well as teaching papers in the joint degree of Classics and English.
