Bio

I studied English and German at the University of Oxford, before spending a year as a DAAD Scholar at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität, Heidelberg. During this time I worked on the Romantic authors Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, and developed an interest in German Nationalism and its links with Romanticism and ‘folk’ culture.

My work on romantic medievalism led me to pursue an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, where I wrote a thesis exploring the use of harps and lyres in the performance of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse oral poetry. I wish I had had the guts to call it ‘Harping On’ at the time… A PDF is available here.

After this I moved back to the eighteenth-century and wrote a PhD thesis at University College London exploring how German poets in the late eighteenth-century responded to the Seven Years’ War, Bavarian Wars of Succession, and Napoleonic Wars. I have published several articles and a co-edited volume based on this research.

After a year as a teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol, I became a lecturer at the University of Reading, and have since been working on the history and literature of the 1930s and the Second World War in both Britain and Germany. My current project Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40 is funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation.

I also enjoy thinking and writing about teaching, and have published articles exploring my pedagogical practices. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.