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Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Leeds

My research focuses on British Romanticism and the environmental humanities. My most recent book, _British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene_ (Palgrave, 2017) examines a wide range of texts in relation to the global crisis created by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. This book was part of a broader AHRC-funded project on Romanticism and catastrophe, which involved an international conference entitled 'Mediating Climate Change' and public engagement collaborations with the Wordsworth Trust and Cape Farewell. For further details, see http://romanticcatastrophe.leeds.ac.uk/.

I'm currently working on a collaborative AHRC-funded project to write a history of British nature writing over the last two centuries for Cambridge University Press: https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/. Increasingly, I am motivated as a researcher by the opportunity to engage broader audiences with pressing environmental issues and am in the process of developing new public engagement collaborations around culture and climate. In the longer term, I'm planning a book on the relationship between philosophical pessimism and environmental thinking.

Past projects include the monographs _Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine_ and _Romantic Englishness_, a co-edited issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies on 'Contesting Creativity', and the co-edited book _Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism_.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Leeds

Education

  • 2002 
    University of York, PhD