Research Overview

I am interested in creative responses to space, time and the environment, across languages and cultures. I have worked on English and German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Paul Celan, J. H. Prynne, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Edwin Morgan and Friederike Mayröcker. I'm particularly fascinated by poets who push the boundaries of the lyric form and who approach poetry as a way of knowing space, time and the environment. My first monograph, Space, Place and Poetry in English and German, 1960-1975 (Palgrave, 2018), looked at engagements with place and landscape in the work of a range of writers working in the twentieth-century, at a moment of rapid transformation in thinking about space and spatiality. I argued that writers in these two quite different traditions were working through similar issues of disrupted spatiality and, in so doing, were also radically reimagining the European lyric in ways that only a comparative reading could bring properly into focus.

My current research covers two main areas. First, I am interested in questions of time and the environment across disciplines and cultures. This emerged from my work on 'Anthropocene Lateness' in the poetry of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker, published in Austrian Studies 30 (2022). In 2019, I cofounded the British Academy-funded Anthropocene Times research network with Dr Blake Ewing (Hertford College, Oxford), and ran a small research project on how we use creativity to navigate time in the Anthropocene. In 2023-25, Dr Ewing and I are leading a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary research project on 'Wetland Times', comparing time language and concepts across three global wetland landscapes.

At the same time, I continue to be interested in literature and space, particularly extra-terrestrial space, and have worked on representations of extra-terrestrial space and space travel in twentieth and twenty-first century English and German-language poetry. The space beyond earth is highly contested and profoundly culturally significant, and poetry is unique placed to help us think through the implications of technological developments in space exploration and the new perspectives these afford on planet earth.

I am a member of the EGS collective, a group which aims to work towards a more equitable German Studies in the UK. I also co-founded and co-convene the Languages and Environments Reading Group at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, with Dr Kasia Mika (QMUL) and Dr Jamille Pinheiro Dias (ILCS).