Research Overview

 

My work is primarily in three fields; some examples are given below:

  • Attention Studies (technology and the crisis of distraction)
  • The Future University (disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and new infrastructures of knowledge)
  • Culture, Modernity, Psychology and Technological Revolution

Attention Studies

  • Close Reading as Attentional Practice, with Ewan Jones, Edinburgh University Press (November 2025)
  • ‘Are young people’s attention spans really shrinking? It’s more complex than you might think’, The Guardian (26th Dec 2024); front page of ‘Journal’ section.
  • ‘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).
  • Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet, a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018).

The Future University

  • ‘The Evolution of the Humanities’, Higher Education Policy Institute blog (April 2023): https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/04/19/the-evolution-of-the-humanities/
  • ‘The Humanities in the UK Today: What is Actually Going on?’ Lead author, co-written with a group of UK leaders in the Humanities (Higher Education Policy Institute, 2023)
  • ‘Radical Interdisciplinarity’; Times Higher Education (18 July, 2021): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/post-pandemic-recovery-requires-radical-interdisciplinarity
  • ‘The Arts and Humanities: Shaping the Future’; a blog post for Advance HE: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/arts-and-humanities-shaping-future (November 2020).
  • Digital Lyric: Beyond the Book; academic consultant for this public exhibition at Morges Castle, Switzerland, funded by Swiss National Science Foundation (2020).
  • 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.

Culture, Modernity, Psychology and Technological Revolution

  • ‘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.
  • ‘Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle’ (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 (Jan 2020).
  • ‘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)

Recovering Forgotten Figures: 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 queering of key concepts in late-Victorian literature, culture, and the arts:

  • 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)