Associate Professor, Fellow and Tutor in German, St Peter's College

Research

My research focuses on German literature and culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its later reception. Particular interests include German Romanticism, the writing of E.T.A. Hoffmann, myth, orientalism, and cultural transfer. I have also published on the practice and perception of authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

I was awarded my Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh in 2013, for my thesis 'The Image of the Orient in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Writing'. My first book, derived from this thesis, is entitled E.T.A. Hoffmann's Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination, and was published in Legenda's 'Germanic Literatures' series in 2016.

I am now working on a new project about the influence and critical reception of German Romanticism in contemporary German and world literature. I also enjoy public engagement work and have contributed to a podcast series on the composer Gustav Mahler, produced by Aaron Cohen of New York Public Radio: https://www.theworldofgustavmahler.org/

Teaching

I teach the German Paper VIII, Papers X and XI (Goethe, Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Kleist, Heine, Mann), and the prelims literature papers. I also teach translation.

As a former attendee of the Sutton Trust Summer School (now replaced by UNIQ Summer School at Oxford), I am particularly interested in schools access work. I have led seminars at UNIQ and college-based academic taster sessions.

Publications

Books

(ed. with Jenny Haase) German Romanticism and Latin America: New Connections in World Literature (Oxford: Legenda, forthcoming [2022])

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination (Oxford: Legenda, 2016)

Book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals

'The functions of dreams in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Meister Floh (1822)',  in Eyes Wide Shut: Dreams, Visions, and Somnambulism in German Literature, Art, Medicine and Philosophy 1750-1835, forthcoming with Königshausen & Neumann 

‘Wilhelm Müller's Leiermann, Elfriede Jelinek's Leierfrau, and Radical Repetition’,  Publications of the English Goethe Society, 88:1 (2019), 21-38

‘German Romanticism as Translational World Literature: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and Andrés Neuman's El Viajero del Siglo’, Modern Languages Open, 2018 (1), 24. Fully open access: https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/articles/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.179/

‘Speculative Authorship: The Family Narrative as Editorial Project in Theodor Storm’s Carsten Curator’,  Forum for Modern Language Studies, 54:3 (2018), 320-34

‘The Dangers of Harmony: German Romantic Thought in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 53:2 (2017), 200-219

‘Writers' Lives for the Nation: Karl Gutzkow's Author-Biographies and the German Book Market’, Oxford German Studies, 45:2 (2016), 157-74

‘Alla Turca versus the Romantic East: E.T.A. Hoffmann and Oriental-Style Music’, German Life and Letters, 67:2 (2014), 139-58

Edited journals

‘The Author in the Popular Imagination: Views from the Nineteenth Century’, Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, 54:3 (2018) (with Sandra Mayer)

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 6: ‘Melancholy’ (2011) (with Alex Stuart)

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 5: ‘Myth’ (2010) (with John McKeane)