I originally joined King’s in 1995 from the University of York, which is where I completed my doctoral thesis, having studied previously at the universities of Wales (St David’s University College, Lampeter) and Edinburgh. From 2004‐2008 I was Head of the Department of American Studies. In 2010, American Studies was incorporated into the Department of English, where I was Head of Department from 2022-2025.

Research interests

• American poetry, particularly the broad experimental tradition that runs through Dickinson, Whitman, Moore and Williams, to the likes of Niedecker, Oppen and Creeley
• Twentieth‐century British and Irish poetry, especially those poets who have engaged with the great American experimental tradition, such as Basil Bunting, Mina Loy and J. H. Prynne, as well as idiosyncratic figures like W. S. Graham and Geoffrey Hill
• Romanticism and modernism
• Henry James
• Literary and philosophical relations (especially phenomenology, psychoanalysis, pragmatism, Frankfurt School Critical Theory)

I have supervised doctoral research on Emily Dickinson, Louis Zukofsky, Thom Gunn, John Ashbery, Muriel Rukeyser, contemporary American realism and Robert Penn Warren among others.

Teaching

I have taught across the range of 19th and 20th century American literature from James Fenimore Cooper to Grace Paley and Gayl Jones. A great deal of my undergraduate teaching is focussed on modern American poetry, or modern British and Irish poetry, especially as regards notions of place or the relations between poetry and painting. At postgraduate level I have taught courses on poetry and phenomenology and on Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne.