I am an Associate Professor in English at Flinders University interested in the literature and culture of the British long eighteenth century (including Romanticism), the Gothic, Jane Austen, literary representations of death and suicide, and the history of emotions.

My first book, Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition (Ashgate, 2013), is the first long study of this devotional poetic mode, one that highlights how its preoccupation with death and salvation makes visible the articulation or negotiation between contemporary religious concerns and emerging aesthetics of poetic practice. Further research examining the mode’s proto-Gothic sensibilities has culminated in Graveyard Gothic (Manchester UP, 2024, with David McAllister and Xavier Aldana Reyes), a transhistorical volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.

I have also recently published Jane Austen and Vampires: Love, Sex and Immortality in the New Millennium (Palgrave, 2024), a monograph that examines the unlikely literary convergence of Jane Austen and vampires in fanfic mashups since Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. It argues that such amateur writings reveal a great deal about contemporary romantic ideals and the changing perceptions of what Austen and vampires signify in the twenty-first century.

Currently, I’m working on monograph on representations of suicide in print and on stage in the British eighteenth century, titled Imagining Suicide and contracted with Manchester UP.

I also serve as the President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS), and State Representative  (SA) for the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE).

• 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)
• Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare (1)

2024 - HASS Research Excellence Award

2023 - Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship (Yale University)

2021 - Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

2020 - HASS Teaching Excellence Award

2016 - Fletcher Jones Fellowship, Huntington Library

2014 - Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Queensland