Lecturer in English Literature
Department of English, History & Creative Writing
Profile
I joined Edge Hill University in 2021, after holding a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship at the University of Glasgow.
I am a specialist in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature and culture. My research is mainly concerned with the history of medicine and science in this period, with a particular focus on representations of drugs, their use, and abuse. My research and publications cover areas such as the depiction of Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine habit, the history of eugenics, fin-de-siècle understandings of medicine and magic, and the Victorian origins of sports doping. I am also interested in science fiction, detective fiction, and medical gothic from the nineteenth century to the present.
Research Interests
- Literature and Drugs
- Literature and Medicine
- Science Fiction
- Detective Literature
- Narrative and Video Games
Teaching
At undergraduate level I teach and lead modules on:
- LIT1025: Form
- LIT3054: Vampire Fictions
- LIT3040: Victorians
- LIT2050: Romanticism
- LIT1024: Literary History
- LIT2051: The Brontës
I invite MRes and PhD proposals from students working on Literature and Drugs, Victorian medicine, literature and science, posthumanism, detective fiction, and nineteenth-century gothic.
Publications
Books
- Cocaine, Culture and Literature, 1860-1919 [Forthcoming]
Articles
- ‘Primitive Doctor and Eugenic Priest: Grant Allen, M. P. Shiel, and the Future of the Victorian Medical Man’, Journal of Literature and Science. 11.2 (Winter 2018): 40-61.
- ‘Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man’ Journal of Victorian Culture. 21.1 (Spring 2016): 3-20.
- ‘Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine: A 7% Solution for Modern Professionalism’ English Literature in Transition. 58.3 (June 2015): 341-360.
Selected Conference Papers
- ‘Cocaine Nations: Professional Sport, Performance Enhancing Drugs, and Victorian Trans-Atlantic Relationships’, BAVS, University of Dundee August 2019.
- ‘Skin Deep: Addiction, Cocaine Bugs, and Arthur Machen’s “The White Powder”’, VPFA Annual Conference, Greenwich Naval College, July 2019.
- Keynote Address: ‘Cocaine and the Victorian Origins of Addiction’, Royal College of Psychiatrists Addictions Faculty Annual Meeting, Dunkeld, March 2019.
- Keynote Address, ‘Sherlock Holmes and ‘Sports Doping’: Cocaine, Profession, and Performance,’ Substance Use and Abuse in the Long Nineteenth Century, Edge Hill University, September 2019.
- ‘Blood Magic and Godly Substance: The Island of Dr Moreau and Victorian Anthropologies of Medicine’, Anxious Forms: Blood, Sweat and Tears, Aston University, July 2018.
- ‘Cocaine, Technology, and Modernity, 1884–1914,’ Diseases of Modern Life: Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century Conference, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, September 2016.