Formerly at Lancaster University
My research interests are: nineteenth-century women’s writing, the transatlantic and archival turns, the intersection between nineteenth-century religious and feminist thought, and the connection between creative and critical writing. My practice and teaching in Creative Writing concerns creative non-fiction, life-writing and memoir, and I am currently working on the first biography of the nineteenth-century painter, writer and activist, May Alcott Nieriker. Additionally, I am a practising poet who has collaborated with visual artists in Italy and the US.
My first book, The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti (Routledge 2021), recovers the influence of the authors’ mothers and sisters on their juvenilia, devotional life-writing, and public work and considers how their affiliation with their matrilineal communities shaped their responses to the Transcendentalist and Pre-Raphaelite movements respectively. Although Alcott and Rossetti never met, and despite the fact they inhabited vastly different cultural and religious contexts, there was a significant overlap in their lived experiences of their faith, which can broadly be defined as mystical. I interpret Alcott’s and Rossetti’s mystical experiences through the lens of my own, thereby creating the first practice-based work of criticism in the fields of American and Victorian Studies.
My second book, The Forgotten Alcott: Essays on the Artistic Legacy and Literary Life of May Alcott Nieriker, is co-edited with Lauren Hehmeyer and is forthcoming with Routledge’s Studies In Nineteenth Century Literature (December, 2021). It is the first academic study of Nieriker, containing scholarship on her early life in Concord among the Transcendentalists, her abolitionist painting and activism, the network of expatriate feminist artists she forged during her studies abroad, her experimental travel writing and fiction, and her work as an teacher, journalist, and curator. A truly ‘Renaissance Women’, Nieriker is recovered here as a transdisciplinary subject who stands between disciplines, networks, and ideologies—stiving to recognize the dignity of others
I teach undergraduate and postgraduate module in the long nineteenth-century, American literature, and Creative Writing.
I completed my PhD in American Studies at the University of East Anglia in 2019 where I was funded by a UK Fulbright American Studies Fellowship and an AHRC ‘CHASE’ Studentship. Additionally, I have an MA in Victorian Literature, Art and Culture from Royal Holloway and an MA in English from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I have previously taught across the field of American Studies and Creative Writing at both Royal Holloway and the UEA. In 2018, I organised the first international conference on May Alcott Nieriker at Université Paris Diderot, funded by the British Association of American Studies, AHRC ‘CHASE’ and the UEA. As a creative practitioner, I have also received fellowships at a number of writer’s residencies in France, Spain and Italy, and have worked across the public arts sector in museums, galleries, book festivals and publishing houses.
The Matrilineal Heritage of Louisa May Alcott and Christina Rossetti - (routledge.com)
Peer-reviewed monograph, 248 pages. ISBN 9780367514402.
The Forgotten Alcott: Essays on the Artistic Legacy and Literary Life (routledge.com)
Co-edited with Lauren Hehmeyer, 256 pages, 3 colour illustrations. ISBN 9780367691592. Currently scheduled for publication 29th December, 2021.
In The Forgotten Alcott. Routledge, 2021.
‘Successive chapters in a romance’: May Alcott Nieriker’s influence on the development of the woman artist in Louisa May Alcott’s fiction.
In The Forgotten Alcott. Routledge, 2021.
"Here are the model children!": Revisiting Louisa May Alcott's Representations of Her Parents' Educational Theories (accepted with The Concord Saunterer, forthcoming).
‘A Marble Woman: Is the omen good or ill?’: Louisa May Alcott’s exposé of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s repressed individualism in her domestic horror fiction” (accepted with Horror Studies pending minor revisions, peer reviewed, forthcoming).
“‘Do you want to throw yourself into the jaws of sacrifice…you obstinate, ungovernable piece of marble!”: Self-Sacrifice as self-affirmation in Augusta Jane Evans’ Macaria.” Mississippi Quarterly 69.4 (Jan. 2019) 457-480.
‘Her lovely presence ever near me lives’: A Brief Encounter from the Archives with May Alcott Nieriker (briefencounters-journal.co.uk) Brief Encounters 2.1 (Jan. 2018) 53-68.
‘Critics, Coteries and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity by Wendy Graham.’ Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 27, (Fall 2018) 92-97.
‘Love that releases no beloved from loving’: Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s reaction to the ‘courtly love’ convention of Dante Alighieri and his idealization of the female muse. Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 24 (Fall 2015) 47-63.
‘Twofold silence as the Song of Love’: the application of Pater’s concept of Anders-streben, within his discourse of Aestheticism, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life.’ Pre-Raphaelite Review 24(Fall 2015) 2-12.
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in workshop, seminar, course
