I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, working on 'Beyond Between Men: the Medieval Homosocial Imagination'.
I was educated at the University of York and was granted my PhD in Medieval Studies from the University's Centre for Medieval Studies. Since then I have been a visiting lecturer in the History Department at Leeds Trinity University College and was a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council-funded project Signs and States: Semiotics of the Modern State at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. I took up my post at the University of Oxford in October 2011.
My past and current research reflects a wide-ranging but interconnected series of interests largely related to the social, political and literary cultures of later medieval English society, particularly amongst urban elites and the gentry. Within these broad areas I am particularly interested in: gender and sexualities, especially masculinities; the household and family; Middle English romance and its audiences; and reading and writing culture. I have just published my first book, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (D.S. Brewer, 2013).
My principal research interests are related to gender (especially masculinities), family and sexuality in late medieval England, based primarily on Middle English literary and historical sources. Having completed a monograph on fatherhood, I have recently begun a new project on late medieval English homosociality, and am currently working on two articles about male friendship and public displays of masculinity. I am very interested in generic conventions, especially within the romance and epistolary genres, with a focus on their particular vocabularies. I have a strong interest in panhistorical and interdisciplinary approaches to questions of genre and gender which I am currently developing through collaboration with colleagues.