Research Overview

Current projects:

My work has been primarily in three fields, most often in combination:

  • Technology, Modernity and the Production of Knowledge: the relationship between new technologies and the the production, consumption, and creation of knowledge.
  • Poetry, Poetics, and Interdisciplinary Aesthetics (Romanticism to the present): challenging and reconstructing narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity
  • Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle: the politics, poetics, and interdisciplinary contexts of ‘art for art’s sake’

Technology, Modernity and Culture

Projects in this field are usually in dialogue with my work in the other two fields. See, for example:

  • ‘Technologies of Attention: Cultural Forms and Attention Theory at the Turn of the Century’, in CUSP (Journal of Late 19th– /Early 20th-Century Cultures) 1.1 (Winter 2023), pp. 35-44. This was part of an award winning journal special issue (awarded Best New Journal by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals).
  • Digital Lyric: Beyond the Book; academic consultant for this public exhibition at Morges Castle, Switzerland, funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (2020).
  • Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet, a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018).
  • Collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, NYC, and Computer Science in NYU around early LGBTQ+ web art:  ‘Reconstructing Brandon (1998-1999): A Cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities Study of Shu Lea Cheang’s Early Web Artwork’, Digital Humanities Quarterly: 12.2 (2018).
  • Leading the creation of the Online Diaries of Michael Field. See, Digitizing the Diary: Experiments in Queer Encoding’, Journal of Victorian Culture 2016.

Poetry and Poetics: Lyric and Modernity

I have published extensively on the cultural work of ‘lyric’ poetry (necessarily understood in its relationship with the visual and sonic arts) in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Exploring work by writers such as Thomas Hardy, A. C. Swinburne, Alice Meynell, D. G. Rossetti and Ezra Pound, my work interrogates narratives of the relationship between poetry and modernity and argues for a new understanding of poetry’s relevance within a rapidly modernizing environment. See, for example:

  • ‘Palgrave’s Golden Treasury: “Modern” poetry and a new Lyric Canon’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 75-93.
  • ‘Parnassian Cosmopolitanism: Transnationalism and Poetic Form, Victorian Poetry 57.4 (Winter 2019). Translated and published in French by the International Network for the Study of Lyric (http://www.lyricology.org/).
  • The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
  • The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
  • ‘Thomas Hardy’s Poetics of Touch’ (Victorian Poetry 2013)

Aestheticism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle

Decadence and Distributed Cognition: working with later-nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts to resituate debates around perception and modernity through engagement with the history of psychology.

  • Participant in A History of Distributed Cognition, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K.
  • ‘Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle’, forthcoming as part of the AHRC-funded History of Distributed Cognition project: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
  • ‘Arthur Symons’ Impressionist Epistemology: Decadence and Embodied Cognition’, English Literature in Transition (forthcoming Jan 2020).

Recovering Forgotten Late-Victorian Writers; changing our understanding of the aesthetic movement, and of our own critical and cultural values: my work on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature and culture has included uncovering material by largely forgotten late-Victorian writers (Constance Naden, the poet and philosopher, and May Kendall, among others), to reconsider its importance in augmenting and changing our understanding of our own history and cultural values. The work of ‘Michael Field’ (the aunt and niece Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) has been a particular focus because of its interrogation of key concepts in late-Victorian literature, culture, and the arts from a queer perspective. See, for example:

  • Michael Field (1880-1914): Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2007; issued in paperback in 2010)
  • ‘What Kind of a Critical Category is “Women’s Poetry”?’ (Victorian Poetry); reprinted in Nineteenth Century Poetry: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2016)
  • Poetry of the 1890s (Penguin, 1998)