I joined the English Department in February 2010. Before coming to the OU, I worked as a Research Assistant at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, a digital library at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. My work at the NZETC involved encoding literary and historical texts into TEI XML, and this fuelled my interest in the digital humanities. In 2008, I completed a PhD in English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on the history of Shakespearean textual scholarship. I have subsequently published several articles on the pioneering efforts of eighteenth-century Shakespearean editors in the fields of bibliography, authorship studies, and attribution.
At the Open University, I am responsible for maintaining and expanding the Reading Experience Database. My primary research focus is “Transnational Reading during World War I,” which involves analysing the evidence preserved in a wide range of manuscript letters, diaries, memoirs, and notebooks in libraries and archives in England, Wales, and Australia. What role did the circulation of books and letters play in the experience of war? Did mass mobilization change reading practices? What new opportunities did it provide for the circulation of texts and ideologies across national boundaries? I am currently working on a book manuscript, entitled “A Captive Audience? The Reading Lives of British and Australian Prisoners of War, 1914–18,” and an essay collection, co-edited with Shaf Towheed, “Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives.” I have presented papers on my WWI research at conferences and workshops in Britain, the US, and Australia.
Outside of First World War Studies, I maintain an active research programme in Shakespeare studies, and in the histories of reading and authorship generally. I am also broadly interested in colonial literature and “settler studies,” and the role of print and print circulation in the formation of settler and national identities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand and Australia.
"Cardenio and the Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Canon,” in Gary Taylor and David Carnegie (eds.) The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes and the Lost Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming September 2012), 71–84.
“Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28, no. 2 (2010): 35–57.
“Fragmenting Authorship in the Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Edition,” Shakespeare 6, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.
“Alexander Turnbull’s ‘Dream Imperial’: Collecting Shakespeare in the Colonial Antipodes,” Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 34, no. 2 (2010): 69-86.
“Alexander Pope’s 1723-25 Shakespear, Classical Editing, and Humanistic Reading Practices,” Eighteenth-Century Life 32, no. 2 (2008): 3–13.
“‘Small-Scale Copyrights?: Quotation Marks in Theory and in Practice,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98, no. 1 (2004): 39–53.
“Resistant Readers? Socialism and Self-culture in Birmingham, 1890–1910.” Arts and their Audiences Workshop, Open University, 20 February 2012.
"Man of Science, Man of Religion: The Reading of a Medical Missionary in Uganda, 1896-1918." Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 2011 Conference: The Book in Art and Science, 14-17 July 2011, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
"Reading the Great War through Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: J. A. Fallows, MA, and His Copy of My Diaries, 1900–1914." Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) Regional Conference, 28-30 April 2011, University of Queensland, Australia.
"A Captive Audience? The Reading Lives of Australian Prisoners of War, 1914–18." Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Group Seminar, Reading and the First World War, 12 February 2011, Institute of English Studies, University of London.
Older publications and conference presentations can be found via Open Research Online.
