My first project, Moments of Revision: Thomas Hardy and the Making of a Modern Manuscript, is based on my doctoral research and marks the first book-length study of Hardy’s poetry manuscripts. The project approaches Hardy’s drafts through their material and cultural influences, including developments in: modernist printing practices; Victorian political reporting; typewriting, stenography and phonetics; transatlantic manuscript trading; and the institutionalization of English studies. The book fundamentally argues for the significance of Hardy’s long neglected manuscripts to turn-of-the-century developments in the production, acquisition, and study of literary manuscripts.

My second project, Spinning Solidarity, builds upon the Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-65) database. This digital archive provides access to a long-forgotten body of verse produced by working-class poets in the mid-nineteenth century. The project also draws on resources from a wide number of archives across the U.S., U.K., and Ireland, to chart a transatlantic literary network that unfolded across periodical publications. I’m primarily interested in the mutual aid networks that emerged amongst the British working classes in response to the crisis, as well as the development of a vocabulary of ‘solidarity’ in this period.

Research Projects

‘The Cotton Famine: Group of Mill Operatives at Manchester’, The Illustrated London News, November 22, 1862

Manuscript of ‘The New Dawn’s Business’, with revisions. Oxford, The Queen’s College, MS. CCCCXX: Winter Words (1928).