Academia

I received my AHRC-funded PhD in July 2019. During my time at the University of Edinburgh, I taught undergraduate classes for 4 years and read for the James Tait Black Memorial prize. My monograph Larkin’s Travelling Spirit was released in ebook and hardback this January 2021 with Palgrave Macmillan, and I am currently finalising edits for a journal article for Poetics Today, Duke University Press. I have had several reviews and articles published in About Larkin, the Philip Larkin Society’s journal, for which I have recently assumed co-editorship.

My Larkin monograph can be purchased in whole, or as individual ebook chapters, via this link.

From 2013-14, I worked as a research assistant and impact evaluator for AHRC-funded project Writing the North.

My PhD, entitled The Author’s Place: A Study of the Evocation of Place and Space in the Oeuvre of Philip Larkin predominantly explored Larkin’s stylistic debt to place-writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, with noted focus on the travel writing of Charles Baudelaire and the Romantics. It also explored Larkin’s interest in place as a literary topos, in the genius loci generally, and in the political implications of spatial containment as exposed in the works of Bachelard, Blanchot and Foucault.

More broadly, my research interests can be summarised as follows:

• Contemporary Poetics
• Poetry of the Movement period
• Space and Place in Poetry
• Ecocriticism
• Confessional Poetry and Fiction
• Travel in Literature
• The Aesthetics of Mapping
• The Country House Poem
• Romanticism