I am an Associate Professor of English and Bachelor of Arts Honours Coordinator at Flinders University. I gained my PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2009 and worked at the University of Queensland before arriving atspend tim Flinders in 2015. I have been invited and funded to visit and research at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH, University of Edinburgh), the British Museum, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University).

My research revolves around the literature and culture of the British long eighteenth century, especially related to death and suicide, sensibility, and the Gothic. In 2013 I published my first monograph, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Ashgate), which is the seminal study of this devotional, proto-Gothic and pre-Romantic poetic mode.

I also have two books forthcoming: Jane Austen and Vampires (Palgrave, 2024), and a co-edited collection on Graveyard Gothic (Manchester UP, 2024, with David McAllister and Xavier Aldana Reyes). I’m currently working towards a monograph examining the interplay of sentimentalism, satire and sin in eighteenth-century representations of suicide. 

• British eighteenth-century literature and culture
• British Romanticism and its legacies
• Gothic fiction, especially up to 1830
• cultures and literary representations of death and suicide
• graveyard poetry
• vampires
• Jane Austen
• Judaeo-Christian mythology in literature (especially Satan, the Wandering Jew, Cain, and Judas)

• William Blake (1)
• Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction (1)
• The Brontes (1)
• Sir Walter Scott (1)
• Delarivier Manley (1)

2023 - Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship (Yale University)

2021 - Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

2020 - CHASS Award for Excellence in Teaching

2016 - Fletcher Jones Fellowship, Huntington Library

2014 - Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Queensland