I am a Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Ghent University. My project, The Heiress: Women, Property, and Economics, 1780-1900, combines literature and social and economic history in its analysis of the figure of the heiress throughout the long nineteenth century. In a first-of-its-kind endeavour, this project uncovers the documented experiences of six British female estate and business owners and considers them alongside fictionalisations in the realist novel. In so doing, it is the first research project to show that the figure of the heiress is essential to the understanding of the long nineteenth-century’s social, economic, and literary history. Outputs for this project will include my third academic book, two peer-reviewed academic articles, and an online series of talks, "Women, Property and Economics."
I am a literary scholar and historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My research focuses on women, property and cultural heritage, and the Romantic period’s legacies in popular culture. I am the author of the monograph Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen (Peter Lang, 2022) and the duograph Reading the Romantic Ridiculous (Routledge, 2024), with Dr. Andrew McInnes. My work has been published in journals such as the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Studies and The Journal of Popular Culture, as well as in several edited collections. I have received multiple awards throughout my career, including the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ President’s Prize for my research on Austen.
I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of History at the University of Liverpool, where I am now an Honorary Fellow. I am currently working on an edited collection on digital humanities and book history, Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Atlantic, with Professor Mark Towsey and Dr. Sophie Jones. I am a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a member of several UK academic societies, including the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Association for Romantic Studies.
My PhD thesis, Women in Residence: Forms of Belonging in Jane Austen – awarded in March 2019 at the University of Warwick – offered an original reconceptualisation of ownership, which included legal as well as affectionate relationships towards property, in its consideration of how the women in Austen’s novels establish feelings of ownership towards houses they are not legally entitled to own.
Recent Publications:
"Witches and Jedi Guardians: Jane Austen’s Portraits Then and Now," Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal
"Sadist, Land Shark, and Reptile: Autumn de Wilde's EMMA." with Andrew McInnes, The Journal of Popular Culture
"Reading for Normal: Young People and YA Fiction in the Time of Covid‑19," with Alison Waller, Mémoires du Livre: Studies in Book Culture
