I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, where I was a research assistant on the Leverhulme-funded Godwin Diary Project and wrote my doctoral thesis on the radical journalist William Cobbett.

I joined King’s in 2011 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow to work on the history and literature of religious dissent. Between 2014 and 2016 I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council-funded project Music in London, 1800-1851.

Research interests

• Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London
• Cobbett, Hazlitt and the radical press
• The Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle
• Romanticism and the environmental humanities
• Literary culture and histories of music, song and voice

My research is focused on the politics and print culture of the Romantic period. My first monograph, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) offers a new interpretation of Cobbett as a Burkean radical whose writing cuts across the ‘revolution controversy’ of the 1790s, combining Thomas Paine’s common sense and transatlantic radicalism with Edmund Burke’s emphasis on tradition, patriotism and the domestic affections. I co-edited an anthology of Cobbett’s writings and a volume of essays by scholars from literary studies, social history and the history of political thought on Cobbett’s contexts and legacies. I have also co-edited a selection of William Hazlitt’s writings for Oxford World’s Classics (2021).

My current work is on the intersections between literary studies, religious history, musicology and sound studies. My second monograph, Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789-1840, was published by the British Academy and Liverpool University Press in 2026 and is available as an open access publication. It explores the ways in which Dissenting writers thought and wrote about music, offering a new understanding of Romantic literary culture, the evolution of Protestant Nonconformity and the contested place of music in nineteenth-century Britain. I have co-edited two collections of essays on related themes: Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which won the 2025 Diana McVeagh Prize, awarded biennially by the North American British Music Studies Association for the Best Book on British Music.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I teach poetry, life writing, the history of the novel, the writings of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley circle, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the cultural history of London, the relationship between literature, music and sound studies, and the place of literature within the environmental humanities. 

Expertise and public engagement

I am a trustee of Keats-Shelley House museum in Rome and editor of the Romantic Studies journal The Keats-Shelley Review.

Selected publications

• Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent, and Literary Culture, 1789-1840 (British Academy and Liverpool University Press, 2026)
• Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain, edited with Brian H. Murray (Bloomsburg Academic, 2023)
• Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, edited with Carmel Raz (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays, edited with Jon Mee (Oxford World’s Classics, 2021)
• William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)