Academic Work

About

I specialise in how adaptation allows creative material to shift between genres, art-forms and languages within the contexts of its appearance. A major focus of my work on eighteenth-century ‘afterlives’ is Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), whose reception in Britain and beyond can be gauged by exploring Sterneana: the numerous and varied adaptations his writing has inspired from 1760 onwards in different forms and media. Sterneana encompasses texts, images, drama, music, material objects, and much more. I’ve worked on a collaborative Digital Humanities project that makes some of this material freely accessible for all to view online.

I continue to publish and present papers 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’. 

My work on the eighteenth-century British novel and the arts speaks to my longstanding interest in the intersection between literature and visual culture throughout this period. I am currently working on a research grant-funded project that explores this terrain. One of the project’s outcomes will be a multi-authored collection of essays addressing widespread aspects of the field, to be published by Edinburgh University Press, which I’m co-editing with Jakub Lipski. 

I am currently working on a monograph on irony in the eighteenth century. I regularly contribute reviews to The Scriblerian, and I am a participant of the international DIGITENS project (The Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century).