Academic

I am a Professor of English at the University of Birmingham.

The department of English Literature is one of the largest and most highly-rated in the country, with expertise across the span of literary history, opportunities for interdisiplinary work, and partnerships with a range of cultural organisations. I teach third-year modules on Virginia Woolf and Creative Non-Fiction and a Master’s-level module on Modernist Literature, as well as contributing to a number of other modules from first year onwards.

I have supervised and examined many research theses over the years. Current and recent graduate projects include:

modern writer-gardeners and garden history | literature of forests and forestry | Bruges and Romanticism | Hay Festival past and present | Neo-Romanticism and travel | ancient ritual sites in twentieth-century culture | transatlantic rural modernisms | Virginia Woolf and eighteenth-century writers.

I welcome enquiries from scholars considering a PhD at Birmingham. I am particularly interested in supervising projects relating to modernism, early-mid twentieth-century art and literature more widely, landscape and place, British painting, literary inheritance across periods, and aspects of contemporary British fiction and non-fiction.

Read more about English at Birmingham and explore the work of graduate students funded by Midlands4Cities consortium.

With my colleague Jessica Fay, I lead a forum called Arts of Place. We run events on campus and online, our mailing list is open to all, and our wesbite offers resources for those interested in the relationships between landscape, locality and the arts.

Oxford Centre for Life-Writing

I’m a long-term supporter of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and a member of its advisory board.

https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/oclw

If you’re interested in the many ways in which lives are written – biographies, memoirs, obituaries, shilling lives and three-volume lives, fictions, half-fictions, lives of musicians, scientists, objects, houses – have a look at the events programme, resources and the podcast archive. From 2020-2026 one of the Weinrebe Lectures on Life-Writing has been held annually at the University of Birmingham, with speakers including Richard Mabey and Jenny Uglow exploring the life-writing in relation to place. Many of the lectures are available to listen again on the Arts of Place website.