I'm a lecturer in early modern studies at Kent and an advisor and guest lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe. I've worked as a teacher in primary and secondary schools and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the CAPITAL Centre at Warwick University, the University of Birmingham and King's College, London. I've also worked as an administrator for Contact Theatre, Manchester, and for the BBC's Write Years Ahead new writing scheme.

My research focuses on literature, performance and cultural theory, particularly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I'm currently working on my first monograph, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (MUP, 2013), which celebrates the importance of Shakespeare's best-selling and now largely forgotten contemporary. Working with Lyly has been lots of fun and I'm looking forward to unleashing the results soon. I'm also editing a collection of essays with Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford), entitled The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2013). This volume rethinks the Elizabethan canon by placing now-famous writers, such as Shakespeare and Donne, alongside books and printed texts that were much more popular in the period itself: maternity manuals, sermons, romances, proclamations, poetry collections and Bibles. I hope that both these books will enable a view of the early modern period that is both historically rigorous and yet new. Whilst finishing these two books, I'm engaged in a new research project with Steve Purcell (Warwick University) and the Pantaloons theatre company exploring the ways language produces gesture onstage.

At Kent I teach on the BA modules Elizabethan Drama, Jacobean Drama and Early Modern Literature, and lecture for Early Drama and Romanticism and Critical Theory. I teach and co-convene an MA module, Shakespeare and Material Culture, and teach the core Medieval and Early Modern MA module, Reading the Evidence. I'm currently supervising a doctoral thesis on Nashe and Aretino, part of my work in support of the new international doctoral programme, TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe).  I'm involved with the wider teaching community across the county, finding ways to help teachers and students discover Shakespeare together. In this capacity I've recently run a set of workshops at Brompton Academy, Gillingham for GCSE students, and will be giving a series of mini-lectures in support of National Schools Film Week. At the Globe I give public workshops and lectures, and am especially involved with the Read Not Dead series.

Research supervision

I would welcome approaches from anyone interested in the early modern period, especially with regards to performance theory, book history, representations of the body and sexuality on and off the stage, reception theory, pedagogy and the history of English as a scholarly discipline.

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