About

I am a writer and researcher based in London.

I grew up in South Wales and studied English at the University of St Andrews (2012) before coming to London to study for an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London (2013). I received my PhD in English literature from King’s College London in 2018 and have held research grants and fellowships in California and Washington DC. I am currently based at the University of Sussex and the Open University.

My research considers poetry and its connections with philosophy and medicine, specifically in relation to questions of life, death, and what it means to be solitary. It reveals that poetry, with its carefully chosen rhymes and rhythms, has the power to offer a metrical space for reflection on these questions for both poet and reader.

Since finishing my PhD, I have been an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library, California. In January 2019, I joined the Wellcome Trust funded project, Solitudes, Past and Present, as a postdoctoral research fellow. In September 2022, I joined the Open Thanatology project at the Open University as a visiting academic.

I have appeared on radio and podcasts and at public events, including Medicine Unboxed and Morley College’s Penny Lectures. In 2020 I was shortlisted for the BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers scheme.

With colleagues at KCL and UCL I co-founded The Still Point Journal, a journal showcasing original work by researchers in London, in 2014. I have been the managing editor of the international refereed journal, Literature & History since 2017.