My research is interdisciplinary, located at the intersection between literature, humour and science in the long nineteenth century. I am completing a monograph, The Call to Levity: Laughter, Evolution and the Victorian Literary Imagination 1830-1910 (forthcoming Oxford University Press & the British Academy, 2021); and with Martin Priestman, co-edited a special edition of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 'Evolution and Literature: The Two Darwins' (2016), including my essay, 'Charles Darwin's "Scientific Wit": Incongruity, Species Fixity & the Nonsense of Looking.' I have also recently edited a collection of essays, Victorian Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent (forthcoming Palgrave, 2020), which includes my essay 'George Eliot's Jokes.' I have published on Charles Kingsley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot and ME Braddon, and with Mark Knight, edited Religion, Literature and the Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2010). At Roehampton, I teach a third-year course based on my research called Laughing Victorians. 

BA, MA, PhD (Roehampton)

British Academy PDF (King's College London)

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Courses Taught at Roehampton:

Origins of Genre: The Gothic (1st year)

Victorian Literature (2nd year)

Victorian Literature & Culture (3rd Year): Laughing Victorians & Victorian Thought Worlds

Dissertation & Professional Development (3rd Year)

PhD Supervision:

Mollie Clarke, AHRC TECHNE-funded PhD, 'Female Cross-Dressing, Genre and Popular Literary Forms from 1830 to 1900' (Autumn 2017-)   (Lead Supervisor with Dr Mary Shannon)

Dr Milena Kozic, King's College London PhD,  'Notes about Nothing: Seinfeld and the "Affect Machine"' (2010 - July 2013, passed, no corrections)   (Co-Supervisor with Professor Rosalind Gill)

Lauren Ryall-Stockton, Wellcome-funded PhD, 'Making Object: Affect & Surgically Anatomised Remains from the 19th Century to the 21st Century'   (Co-Supervisor with Dr Mike Brown)

Jay Sullivan, 'Touching the Past: Mummy Fiction, the Masculine Middlebrow & the Sensory Space of Late Victorian Museum Culture 1884-1919'  (Lead Supervisor with Dr Mary Shannon) (Autumn 2019  -)

Alastair Sherwood, AHRC TECHNE-funded PhD, 'Seeing the Funny Side: Slapstick, Visuality & Victorian Literary Form' (Lead Supervisor with Dr Tony Paraskeva)  (Autumn 2019 -)

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, King's College London, Dept of English 2009-12 Out Loud: Fiction, Masculinities & The Science of Laughter (1860-1910), £236,844

AHRC Doctoral Funding, Roehampton University, Dept of English 2006-8 Charles Kingsley and the Politics of Authorship, £32,000

Victorian comedy and laughter; Charles Darwin; George Eliot; Victorian science; nonsense fiction

British Society for Literature and Science

British Association of Victorian Studies