University of Sydney

Faculty Member, English

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

About

My research is focused on eighteenth-century literature and cultural history. I’m especially interested in reading practices and forms of literary sociability. My first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2009), concentrates on texts by Delariver Manley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Edmund Curll and Jane Barker and shows how gossip modelled an interpretative strategy that shaped readers' participation in both literary culture and in public debates. I have also published articles on Delarivier Manley, Queen Anne's correspondence with the Duchess of Marlborough, and Jane Barker.

My two current research projects extend these interests into the long eighteenth century. The first of these, Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe: Gender, Genre and Nation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (funded by an ARC Discovery Grant, 2011-2013), focuses on the twinned careers of Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe in order to investigate the impact of gender and nationalism in debates surrounding the rise of the novel in eighteenth century. The second is a collection of essays entitled 'Reading the Represented Past', with Dr Kate Mitchell (Australian National University). This collection examines the relationship between the reader and the represented past in British fiction since the eighteenth century, focusing on the intersection of historical representation, fictional techniques, and reading practices in order to provide a clearer understanding of the reader’s role in negotiating the relationship between past and present as it is mediated by the literary text.

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