| A graduate of the English department at the University of Kent, Claire’s recent publications include the peer-reviewed chapter, ‘“Scraps of You”: Fabrics of Memory in Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore’ in The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (Bloomsbury, 2024), which explores how Swift uses fabric and textiles to materialise memory and trauma. She has peer-reviewed on Swift, and contributed to public event, ‘From Cowboy Carter to Taylor Swift: Why Country Music Conquered the World in 2024.’ America Now! Public Events at the British Library - British Association for American Studies. In 2027 Claire will publish ‘“I/ have a self to recover”: Undoing Coercive Control in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel,’ in the new Routledge Companion to Sylvia Plath (2027). This chapter revolutionises our understanding of Plath’s final poetry collection by using trauma theory to reconceptualise her poetics as a survivor of domestic violence. She has a special interest in representations of coercive control and non-physical forms of men’s violence in literature and culture. Claire was highly commended at the Kent University Teaching Excellence Awards 2026. She was nominated for Graduate Supervisor of the Year (2023). She has also been nominated three times at the ‘Above and Beyond’ Kent teaching awards. Claire is currently the EDI lead in the School of Humanities, with a particular focus on Student Success and Access and Participation. In 2025 Claire created the ‘POC Humanities Club’ – a space for inclusion and belonging for global majority students in the Humanities, co-organised with paid students in the Humanities. She also hosted, ‘Queer Pasts, Queer Futures’ a collaborative roundtable discussion featuring undergraduate, PhD students and staff. Claire is also the Student Experience lead in the School of Humanities, chairing the Student Voice Forum and leading on the PAL peer-assisted learning scheme. Claire’s current creative-critical project, My Taylor Swift, is a trade book combining creative nonfiction and cultural criticism examining our parasocial relationships with celebrity. This project bridges academic research, creative practice and public engagement. It was inspired by the international conference Claire organised on Taylor Swift in 2024, that brought together scholars, students and the public; the event received national media coverage including on ITV News and Good Morning Britain. Claire has also published on the expat American writer Gertrude Stein, and the second-wave feminist poet Adrienne Rich in the Bloomsbury collection Feminist Moments. Claire was awarded her PhD at the University of Kent in 2018. Entitled The Poetics of Site: Reading the Spaces of Experimental US Women Poets, it explored the poets Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest and Susan Howe, considering the intersections between poetry, spatial theory and feminist criticism using extensive archival research. |
Claire is the co-founder of ‘Radical Pedagogies: The Teaching Network’. Hosting four major conferences since its inaugural event at the University of Kent in 2018, the network brings together academic staff, educational professionals and PhD students from across the country to discuss innovative pedagogy in HE. Foregrounding topics such as punk pedagogies and decolonising the curriculum ‘Radical Pedagogies’ attracts hundreds of participants across our four partner HEIs.
https://radicaldmu.wordpress.com/
Claire’s research interests include intersectional feminism, popular music, trauma theory, 20th century American poetry and radical politics.
In her teaching scholarship Claire focuses on student centred pedagogy, EDI and widening participation. In 2026 she will launch a ‘Global Majority Mentoring Scheme’ funded by the Teaching Excellence Kickstart Fund. This aims to support Student Success and help close racial attainment gaps.
She has presented at a number of teaching conferences, including Advance HE’s EDI Colloquium, ‘Pedagogies of Liberation’ with a one-hour interactive workshop, ‘Mental Health in the Classroom: Collective Close-reading as Compassionate Pedagogy.’ Sheffield. And Teaching Race & Indigenous Literature. Teaching Modernisms Global Online Forum with a paper entitled, ‘Teaching Race as a White person: acknowledging privilege & celebrating difference.’
Claire is keen to collaborate on scholarship projects on anti-racist pedagogy, first generation students access to HE and feminist teaching practices.
I am keen to supervise PhD projects on any of the following topics: Intersectional Feminism, Gender, Race, Trauma Theory, Popular Music, Hip Hop, 20th Century Poetry, Plath studies, Swift studies.
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