Photo by Owen Egan
McGill faculty profile
I am an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of English at McGill University in Montreal. I'm interested in literature of the Romantic period in Britain, especially Lord Byron. My research focusses on three areas: the cultural history of celebrity, print culture and book history, and reception history. I am the author of Byron's Romantic Celebrity (Palgrave, 2007), which argues that our modern celebrity culture began in the Romantic period, and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. I am the editor of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which brings together twelve contributors to assemble the most complete account of Romantic celebrity available. I have also edited a volume of reviews from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for a six-volume selected edition (Pickering and Chatto, 2006), and published articles in a number of journals.
I am the Principal Investigator of the Interacting with Print Research Group, which is funded by grants from FQRSC and SSHRC. Since 2005 our group has developed and continues to elaborate an innovative approach to the study of print culture based on the concept of interactivity. We investigate how people interacted with printed matter, how they used print media to interact with other people and how printed texts and images interacted with each other and with non-print media to form complex media ecologies. 'Interactive' is a word most often associated with digital technologies, but we contend that a nuanced and historicized concept of interactivity is key to developing a deeper understanding of print, which emerged as the predominant communications technology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I am an associate editor for the Byron Journal, a member of the board of the Centre for Romantic Studies at the University of Bristol, and a member of the publications review committee of McGill-Queen's University Press. In 2003-05 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Bristol. I'm now working on a project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, which studies the reception of Romantic authors in later nineteenth-century Britain. I'm paying particular attention to understudied practices of citation, appropriation and redeployment, and to commodified or remediated sites of reception, such as illustrated editions, anthologies, statues and performances.
|
