Poetry
I'm writing a book that revises our understanding of the Middle English period through a series of case studies: poems that literary history says shouldn't exist. As a first move towards this book, I have published an article on a very strange poem: an accidental Shakespearean sonnet from 1448/9, embedded in a romance which imagines itself as a story coming from Persia and translated from Greek. I’m currently writing, among other things, on the coming of regular rhyme to English; on the two-and-a-half medieval inventions of English blank verse; and on the earliest known poem in English with a specific, naming attribution to a woman.
In tandem with this research, I've written a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. How to Read explains English and Scots verse-craft c. 1150–1500 for beginners. Although it serves student and general readers, it contains new research insights too. It's been called 'rigorous and instructive' and 'accessible and welcoming' in the TLS.
Manuscripts
I also find manuscripts interesting. I've written, for example, on the question of lost medieval manuscripts in a collaborative and interdisciplinary study based on several thousand manuscripts in Science in 2022, and in a piece discussing how canonicity works in the corpus of surviving manuscripts we have. I've also published on problems in editing in, for instance, medieval English romance.
My 2020 book, Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500, offers the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. It emerged from the close consultation of hundreds of surviving manuscripts, and it deploys techniques ranging from close readings of rhyme and syntax to surveys of manuscript weight to establish a new ‘baseline’ picture of the reading practices once applied to English verse.
Other research
On the side, I publish on various topics such as manuscript fragments and the history of reading. I have a side interest in the medievalisms of queer California poets, which occasionally yields short articles, such as this piece on Thom Gunn, and a study of Jack Spicer currently forthcoming.
I’m involved in the effort to produce a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete English translation of the Bible and the most sophisticated and most successful of the medieval European vernacular Bible translations. Oxford’s long-term project to re-edit the Wycliffite Bible can be found online. I have also edited Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale and Man of Law’s Tale for the Cambridge Chaucer project.
In the English Faculty, I lecture on topics such as early Middle English, poetry about and by women during the early English Reformation/s, and Middle English verse-craft . I currently convene for the MSt 'B course' in palaeography, codicology, and textual criticism, 650–1550. I also teach on, among other things, the undergraduate Course II 'Material Text' paper and the Course II lyric comparative paper.
I also supervise BA and MSt dissertations, co-supervise DPhil theses, undertake various examining duties, and mentor graduate students.
See also my website, my Twitter profile, and my Bluesky profile.
I have reviewed books for, or am currently reviewing books for, Speculum, The Library, The English Historical Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, the Review of English Studies, the Yearbook of Langland Studies, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, the Journal of the Early Book Society, The Medieval Review, and Arthuriana. I have served as a peer reviewer for a number of journals, including Speculum, Viator, the Review of English Studies, and Philological Quarterly, and for monographs for two academic presses. I welcome book review and peer review requests from editors and consider them all carefully, though I cannot guarantee that I will take them all on!
