After an academic career at the University of Bristol I am an independent scholar based in Oxford and London. These pages include a list of publications, and describe some of my current and earlier projects.
I first specialised in Victorian and Modern literature, especially the work of Robert Browning.
More widely, I have published on individual writers including James Joyce,Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, George Seferis, Ezra Pound and Seamus Heaney.
Other main interests are Philhellenism, and the reception of classical antiquity. A recent essay is:“Ezra Pound’s Ragbag: The Cantos as Cento”, in Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong! ed. Manuel Baumbach (Trier, 2022), pp. 21–40.
I continue to work on Edward Lear, bringing together the written and visual records of his Greek travels to reconstruct Lear’s own projected “Topography of Greece”.
Available so far:
The Grecian travels of 1848
The Ionian Islands in 1848 (Zakynthos, Ithaca and Cephalonia)
Journeys in Greece and Albania in 1856 and 1857
The Ionian Islands in 1863 (Paxos, Lefkada and Kythera)
The Cretan Journal of 1864
A summary page about Lear and Corfu 1848-1877.
Now also available: Lear’s Greek maps. “As befits a topographical artist, Lear was a keen maker, and user, of maps . . . ” This newly-constructed page explores the importance of maps for Lear on his travels in Greece.