School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

Qualifications

• MA Cantab. (Cambridge)
• MA (Manchester)
• PhD (Manchester)

I am a Senior Lecturer in English Literature within the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies.

My current research activities fall into two categories that can be situated under the broad heading “Translation and Analogy”. In the first category are my investigations into the written and visual. These focus on the late works of William Blake: my PhD and publications to date deal with Blake’s Laocoön Separate Plate and the manner in which Blake’s manipulation of these two contesting spheres of artistic production performs the messages of a work known to have been regarded by him as his creed. Work in progress in this area includes investigations into various late productions by Blake that can be classified as replies to, or off-shoots of, pre-existent works (though several of them are also central to Blake’s canon; here I am focusing on notions of the ‘marginal’. Falling into my second category is my work on John Milton’s epics, which locates them within discourses of translation (linguistic and theological).

Publications

• 'Blake and a "curious hypothesis"', Notes & Queries 245.3 (September 2000), pp.308-311
• 'Encyclopaedic Resistance: Blake, Ree's Cyclopaedia, and the Laocoon Separate Plate', Blake Quarterly 37.3 (autumn 2003), pp.44-62
• (Co-authored with Robert N. Essick) 'Newly-Uncovered Blake Drawings in the British Museum', Blake Quarterly 37.4 (winter 2003), pp.84-100