My main research areas span from late eighteenth-century to contemporary literature and culture. Research interests include oral history, reading, memory and forgetting, relating to my work as Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded projects ‘Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers' Life Stories’ and 'Living Libraries' (2014-2020).

Long-standing interests in sound feed into my work in oral history and literature, going back to my first monograph, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (Bloomsbury 2012). I am currently working on Sound Writing, contracted with Oxford University Press.

Research interests in oral history, place and nation, and ghosts, have taken shape in publications including Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (Palgrave 2011), and Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall (Manchester UP 2015). These publications derived from my work as researcher on the AHRC-funded project 'Mysticism, Myth, and 'Celtic' Nationalism' at the University of Exeter from 2008-2011. These publications also illustrate my ongoing interest in/concern about the environment; my future plans involve interviewing environmental activists and exploring the relationship between reading and action.

Current PhDs

Sarah Pyke, 'Textual preferences: The queer afterlives of childhood reading' (2014-2019)

Emily Mercer (2015-), 'Remembering the dead, re-membering the text: rewriting and grief in the poetic works of Anne Carson'

Sarah Hesketh (2017-), 'Making Poetry from Oral History'

Member of AHRC Peer Review College

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Committee Member and Trustee of the Oral History Society

Member of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment

PhD and MA (Birkbeck, University of London)
BA Hons (Bath Spa University)