Since completing my PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2009, I've been fortunate enough to spend to conduct postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH, University of Edinburgh), and to teach at the University of Queensland, before arriving at Flinders in 2015 to take up an ongoing post in English.

My research interests remain primarily centred upon eighteenth-century literature and culture (up to and including Romanticism), literary responses to death, and the Gothic. My first book, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Ashgate, 2013), is the first long study of this devotional, proto-Gothic and pre-Romantic poetic mode.

Currently, I’m writing a short monograph on Jane Austen and Vampires (Palgrave), and co-editing a collection of essays on Graveyard Gothic (Manchester UP). I’m also slowly and steadily working towards a monograph examining the modern role of literary representations (and the public emotions they elicit) in changing understandings of suicide in the latter half of the British eighteenth century.

British long eighteenth century, including:

• Mid-eighteenth century literary culture and €œpre-Romanticism €;
• Gothic fiction, especially up to 1830;
• Cultures of sensibility and sentimental literature;
• British Romanticism and its legacy.

Literature and Death, especially:

• Representations of, and responses to, suicide;
• Associated emotions (such as grief, despair, and melancholy);
• Constructions of literary afterlives;
• Associated genres and modes, such as elegies, epitaphs, €œgraveyard poetry, € eulogies, obituaries, and suicide notes.

Literature and Religion, including:

• Judaeo-Christian mythology in literature (especially Satan, the Wandering Jew, Cain, and Judas);
• Poetic / divine inspiration
• Literature and theology (especially eschatology and soteriology)