My research focuses on medievalism and antiquarianism in the period c.1400-c.1750. My first book, Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, explores how early medieval English literature and history influenced scholarly and popular ideas about the relationship between Old English and Anglo-Saxon culture, and a sense of English identity. 

I am currently working on a series of related projects concerned with book history and collecting, and textual editing, in the early modern period. These include studies of the editing and reading of medieval chronicles in the early modern period based on provenance and annotations; early modern practices of translating Old and Middle English, and Anglo-Norman texts; and private collections of English manuscripts, incunables and early printed books. 

I collaborate regularly with partners across the cultural heritage sector, particularly provincial heritage libraries, archives and museums. In 2015 I became Librarian and Archivist to the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, Britain's oldest provincial intellectual society, founded in 1710. I am currently editing the first of six volumes of the SGS' illustrated minute books, which detail the Society's activities from 1710-29, and preparing catalogues of Spalding's three early modern libraries. In addition to leading the Society's research programme and academic collaborations I provide consultancy for Midlands heritage collections on the conservation, cataloguing and display of rare books, manuscripts and related specimens and artefacts.

I am currently co-supervising three collaborative doctoral awards, based on the collections of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, Kew Gardens, and Keats House and London Metropolitan Archives. I am always interested in hearing from prospective PhD students with interests in medievalism from the early modern period to the present, antiquarianism, book history, library and archive based projects, and linguistic- and material-based approaches to textual scholarship.