My research and teaching focus primarily on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, especially the work of John Milton, John Bunyan, and other Puritan writers, though I have also published on twentieth-century writers and have taught texts from antiquity to the twenty-first century. I have broad research interests that cluster around the intersection of literature, rhetoric, religion and intellectual history. My primary current role is as a researcher on a three-year project entitled ‘Writing Religious Conflict and Community in Exeter 1500–1750’ (ReConEx), funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

 

My first book, The Rhetoric of Conversion in English Puritan Writing from Perkins to Milton, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022 . I am also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Allegory, a forthcoming major reference work by an international team of 40 contributors covering allegorical writing and reading from Plato to Inside Out. My next book project is provisionally entitled Rhetoric and the Quest for Wisdom in the Age of Shakespeare and Milton. I am currently working on articles on gender and 'quasi-persons' in Milton's work and on the compability of tragedy and redemption in Shakespeare's King Lear in light of Luther's theology of the hiddenness of God.

 

I enjoy using creative methods in my teaching alongside more traditional modes of lecture and seminar teaching, and am excited to invite students into captivating conversations around literary texts and their contexts. I am also open to invitations to speak to school, community and public audiences on topics relating to my academic work.