About

I am a literary critic, art historian, non-fiction writer and Professor of English at the University of Birmingham.

I am the author of The Rising Down: Lives in a Landscape, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2025. Previous books include Weatherland and Romantic Moderns. I review new fiction, mainly for the Guardian, and I wrote about art for a range of organisations including the Royal Academy and Tate. Many of my essays and reviews are available to read on this website. I like to read and think across art forms and across periods, and I try to understand how cultures past and present illuminate each other. I was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2014 and awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Chichester in 2026.

I have served as Chair of judges for the Forward Prizes and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, as well as sitting on many other panels and juries. It’s always a privilege to act as a prize judge.

I am proud to work with a range of arts organisations. I am a Trustee of the Strachey Trust, which works to promote access to literary manuscripts and, with the Society of Authors, awards the Strachey Trust Grants for archive work. I am proud patron of Shoreham Wordfest, a superb annual festival on the Sussex coast, fostering literature, history and community.

I sit on the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, which meets five or six times a year to consider designs for official UK coins, seals and medals. With a history stretching over more than a thousand years, the Royal Mint is known as ‘the original maker’. The RMAC works closely with technicians, artists and designers to continue this tradition of numismatic art in ways that meet the needs of contemporary culture. I also serve on the committee responsible for selecting themes for commemorative coins.

I live and write in Oxford. After twenty-five years it’s still thrilling to turn into Radcliffe Square and see the lights of the Bodleian. I’m often on a train to Birmingham or London, but I also spend as much time as possible in my native Sussex.

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I grew up in the Arun Valley, and though I moved away many years ago I still think of the stretch of the South Downs between Pulborough and Chichester as home. I went to St Joseph’s Convent in Storrington and then to Farlington School near Horsham. I’m profoundly grateful to all those who helped me become the first in the family to go to university.

I read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and then moved to London where I worked in the Department of British Drawings and Watercolours at Christie’s King Street. I went on to do an MA at the Courtauld Institute, specialising in modern European Art. I wrote about the revival of the landscape watercolour in the 1930s Britain, though at the time it felt rebellious to choose a British subject for my dissertation. The project made me want to explore the relationship between the art I discovered on the MA and the modernist fiction (especially by Virginia Woolf) that was my first big literary passion. This became the subject of the doctoral thesis I wrote over the next three years in Oxford, and eventually – much revised – it turned into Romantic Moderns.

I started my career as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2007. I worked in the English Department there for ten years, becoming a Senior Lecturer and then a Professor. It was a privilege to talk about literature with eight or nine students at a time in my office on Chatham Street and later on Abercromby Square. I ran an MA in Contemporary Literature from 2008 to 2013, and convened ‘Modernism’ for second-year undergraduates from 2008 to 2016. I taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction, and particularly enjoyed the first-year survey courses which offer students a glimpse of the great panorama of literary history and a sense of how we might make connections across time.

In 2017 I took up a Professorial Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and from 2023 continued at Birmingham as Professor of English. I’m lucky to be part of a large and vibrant community of thinkers in the College of Arts and Law. The Department of English Literature offers outstanding expertise across the span of British literary history and much more besides. I particularly enjoy collaborating with colleagues specialising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. As a teacher and graduate supervisor, I love working with students as they bring new eyes and understandings to enduring texts that change with every reading.

Liverpool staff and students on a reading weekend at Gurney Manor, Somerset, part of a Landmark Trust pilot project.