Academic staff

I joined the School of English at Sheffield University in 2007, having previously taught at Leeds University and the University of Northampton.

Postcolonial literatures, childhood and youth in global literatures, literature and international development, medical humanities.

My primary research interests lie in nineteenth-century literature, particularly Victorian poetry.

Literary stylistics, specifically the narrative style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel. Book history, textual culture and experimental literature.

The poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. Romantic poets and prose writers. Milton and Spenser. Post-war British and Irish poetry, particularly Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden.

Techno-culture; critical theory; cultural studies; subject formation; the ‘inhuman’

Modernism, literature and science, law and literature, and Irish Studies. 

Twentieth-century American and British poetry, letter writing, and contemporary cinema.

Contemporary and Romantic poetry and poetics, ecocriticism, translation, and avant-garde little-magazine cultures

History of the English language, using methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics and computational linguistics.

Realism, class, and region in contemporary cultural texts. British film and television drama, working-class literature, and pedagogy.

Relationships between language, literature, and cognition. Cognition of linguistic style in both literary and non-literary discourse.

Syntax, semantics and second language acquisition.

Gothic, horror, and religion from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century

Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing.

Literary form and rhetoric, particularly of early modern literature.

Early modern language, the philosophy of translation, and the reception of the Bible in English.

Religious language, disciplinary discourse, English for Specific Purposes.

Later Modern English and Historical Sociolinguistics. As a literary scholar my specialism lies in prose of the Romantic period.

Death rituals, weird landscapes, and folk horror. Experimental nonfictional, poetic, and hybrid writing, and in small press publishing.

Modernist, mid-century and avant-garde writing.

Contemporary poetry, prose and the hybrid; the prose poem, archive, collage, auto-theory, creative translation as emerging modes of polyphonic texts; phenomenology, psychogeography & critical theory.

Contemporary performances of Shakespeare's plays, physical theatre, political theatre, globalization, Irish theatre, performance art.

Eighteenth-century Scottish literature; connections between poetry and gothic writing in the eighteenth century; print culture and patriotic sentiment in eighteenth-century Britain.

The representation of animals and the ethics of human-animal relations in literature, film and culture since 1945.

Corpus semantics, including corpus methodology and lexical semantics; development research, including co-produced and community-led methodology; analysis of concepts and discourses in development work

Animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period.

Non-linguists’ perceptions of language variation. In particular, present research examines real-time reactions to regional speech, and in particular which features naïve listeners respond to.

How individuals and communities use language to construct social styles, differences, and affiliations.

Critical discourse analysis in combination with political theory to investigate questions of identity, power, and representation in public life.

Twentieth-century literature; modernism; literature and science; animal studies; the sea

Seventeenth-century literature. Cheap print, Ben Jonson, news writing in the seventeenth century, interregnum royalism and its connection to Restoration culture.

Research on the intersection between first language acquisition and generative syntactic theory.

Morpho-syntactic variation in World Englishes, looking at the impact of the sociolinguistic context on formal structures.

Beckett, espionage fiction, contemporary poetry, the Cold War and the construction of Europe.

20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literature, with especial focus on British modernism and late modernism, and war.

Connections between cinema and landscape and the representation of navies, naval combat and naval history on film.Australasian cinema, genre films and auteur studies.

Victorian life writing. The work and legacies of radical and transgressive figures, particularly women writers and “queer” artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, in particular, the genre of the early modern sermon.

Renaissance literature, especially drama.

Sound change, and I focus particularly on theories of diachronic phonology and the interface of phonetics and phonology. Experimental phonetics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.

Professor of Tudor & Renaissance Literature, early modern (or Renaissance) literature and culture.

Unique sensory experiences in performance; performing robots and nonhuman performance; theatre in the dark and immersive theatre; Practice as Research; scenography, atmosphere, light and sound design.

Gothic of the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century.

History of Ideas; the main focus of my research is the way in which language has been – and is now – conceptualised in the context of cross-cultural encounters.

Medieval English drama, early modern theatre, medieval and sixteenth-century Dutch and French drama, and non-dramatic medieval literature.

'Research in practice' in which wide participation, 'co-production', and real-world outcomes are key drivers. The outputs include films, audio pieces, and exhibitions amongst others.

American Literature, critical whiteness studies and theories of race, gender and sexuality.

African-American culture, sports literature, urban contemporary fiction, and autobiography.

I wrote my DPhil on Malcolm Lowry´s Under the Volcano, and worked at the publishers Basil Blackwell before coming to Sheffield in 1989.

Reaching a more complete understanding of how we use linguistic resources when we engage in everyday conversation.

Use of food and the sense of taste in biblical texts, especially in the New Testament and non-canonical literature.

Issues of textual effect and interpretation in relation to contemporary prose, poetry and other texts.

Medieval and early modern Englishes; how Anglo-Norman, Scots, Old Norse and Latin have impacted on the history of English language and literature.

Literature published between the 1760s and 1820s; interactions between the Gothic and Romantic modes during these decades, both in Britain and in France.