Biography
I am Professor in literary and cultural studies and lead the interdisciplinary Research Centre for Arts, Media and Culture (CAMC), with over 50 staff and research students across four Schools. I joined Edinburgh Napier in 2007 after completing a PhD at the University of London (Birkbeck). I currently also serve as the UK's representative on the Board of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE).
There are three main - often interconnected - strands to my research: the critical study of crime and imprisonment, Victorian studies and gender studies. I am particularly interested in how experiences of imprisonment are mediated in literary or other cultural forms. I am the author of Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England (University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), co-author of How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Pluto, 2011), and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), alongside numerous journal articles and book chapters.
I am currently completing a scholarly edition of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh University Press; General Editor Douglas Kerr) and beginning new research on representations of gender-based and sexualized violence in literature and culture.
Committed to working with people and organizations beyond academia, I set up an award-winning prison-university partnership with HMP Edinburgh and am currently co-supervising an ARCS-funded doctoral project with Peterhead Prison Museum and Robert Gordon University.
I have supervised several PhD and MRes projects and welcome applications from prospective research students in crime writing and critical prison studies, nineteenth-century literature and culture, and gender studies.