Contact: [email protected]

After studies at Chetham’s School of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Exeter College, Oxford, I was awarded my PhD from the University of Birmingham in July 2021. My doctoral research on printed images in the early modern sermon was supervised by Hugh Adlington and Tara Hamling. This research was funded by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership and an AHRC-Huntington Fellowship.

From 2018 until 2022, I worked as a UK Research Assistant for ‘GEMMS – Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons’ (SSHRC-funded, University of Regina / University of Saskatchewan). My work for GEMMS resulted in two invited chapters on the future of early modern manuscript sermon studies for A Companion to Preaching and the Sermon in the Twentieth Century (eds. Keith A. Francis and Robert Ellison, under contract with De Gruyter Brill).

In 2021–22, I was also a Visiting Early Career Research Fellow at the John Rylands Library (University of Manchester), a Postdoctoral Fellow at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA), and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Henry E. Huntington Library (San Marino, CA). During this period, my research was also supported by grants and fellowships from the Royal Historical Society, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), the Association for Art History, the Sir John Plumb Charitable Trust, and the Durham Residential Research Library Scheme. 

I was also a Research Associate for the ‘Recovering the Lost Library of John Milton’ project (PIs: Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren) at the University of Cambridge before beginning my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship here in Manchester in September 2022.

Currently, I am the Faculty of Humanities Rep for the University Fellowships Strategy Group at Manchester.

I research the cultural (including the musical) and emotional lives of clergymen in early modern England. My doctoral thesis, ‘‘Speaking now to our eyes’: Visual Elements of the Printed Sermon in Early Modern England’, argued that illustrations in sermons authored by Protestant divines constitute an overlooked form of Protestant art in post-Reformation England. My Leverhulme project, ‘The Clergy and Artistic Recreation in Early Modern England’, investigates the artistic and musical avocations of Church of England clergymen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How did the extracurricular activities of the largest professional body in early modern England contribute to their private and professional lives? And how did their creative pursuits influence their communities and the course of the Reformation in England?

In addition to investigating the creativity of churchmen, I have also cultivated an interest in their private emotions beyond the pulpit. With Thomas Clifton, I am the editor of Writing Early Modern Loneliness, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024. Writing Early Modern Loneliness is the first extended study of loneliness in the early modern era, raising broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions surrounding the history of this emotion as manifested in early modern texts, and the relevance of these texts in today’s world. My chapter for Writing Early Modern Loneliness explores clergymen’s attitudes, in public and in private, towards loneliness as expressed in their interpretations of Genesis 2:18.

A product of the COVID-19 pandemic, Writing Early Modern Loneliness grew partly from our interests in the feelings of isolation engendered by precarity in both the academy and the creative industries. We were commissioned to write on these issues by The Lancet Psychiatry. In addition, I have been commissioned to write an article on the precarity of newly ordained English ministers in the age of Milton for Milton Studies.

DipABRSM, Piano Music Performance

LRSM, Piano Music Performance

BMus (Hons), Classical Piano

MSt, Literature and Arts

PhD, English Literature

FHEA

CONSULTANCY

In 2019, I was a historical consultant for the critically acclaimed BBC series, A House Through Time. I uncovered significant biographical information about the Particular Baptist minister James Poulson, which was featured in Series 3 (Episode 2). 

My joint research project with Thomas Clifton on the topic of early modern loneliness has been covered in The Boston Globe.

I also enjoy writing for popular platforms, including The Conversation.

I am a Fellow of the Advance HE.

In 2023/24, I taught on two third-year MusB modules: Music Performance Studies and Early Opera.

In 2024/25, I am the Course Unit Director for Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts (MusB, Year 2). I will also contribute to Advanced Music Studies: Research Skills in the Digital Age (MusM).