Academic Work

Orcid number: 0000-0003-1574-9682

About

I specialise in eighteenth-century literature and visual culture, with a major focus on the work and reception of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), sermons, letters, and miscellaneous writings.

I am particularly interested in the adaptation and afterlives that flourished in this period: Sterne’s work inspired a particularly energetic critical and creative reception, with adaptations of his work across genres and media (‘Sterneana’) being a significant component. With Helen Williams (Northumbria University) I’ve co-devised Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, an Open Access dataset hosted by Cambridge Digital Library: it makes digital editions of Sterne’s works published in his lifetime and an extensive collection of Sterneana freely accessible to all.

I continue to publish and present on Sterne’s critical and creative legacies, and I take an active role in the international Sternean scholarly community. I’m an editor of The Shandean, a long-running journal dedicated to this author’s life, work, and times. I have spoken about Sterne on BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ hosted by Melvyn Bragg, and on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’. 

I also publish extensively on eighteenth-century visual culture, and the intersections between word, image, and other non-verbal media. With Jakub Lipski, I co-edited a substantial essay collection, The Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, published in 2024.