Biography

I am Professor of English and Research Institute Fellow at Saint Louis University. My research explores literature and music in Victorian Britain as mutually constitutive with a range of nineteenth-century discourses, including constructions of gender, class and political identity. This work has contributed to BBC Two Television in the UK and to the “Essay” on BBC Radio 3. I have lectured internationally, including by invitation at the British Academy and Royal Academy of Music in London; have been twice funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; and am a lifetime Fellow of Gladstone’s Library in Wales where I gave the Annual Gladstone Lecture in 2011. I am looking forward to visiting the University of Melbourne as Macgeorge Fellow and (jointly) Queen’s Sugden Fellow in late 2024, which follows affiliations with University of Cambridge as Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music and Visiting Scholar at St Catharine’s College in 2020.

My academic books are Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism (Cambridge, 2017), The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Ashgate, 2000; Routledge, 2016). I have edited two collections of essays: The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry (Ashgate, 2005; Routledge 2016) and, with Katharine Ellis, Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2013). Linda K. Hughes and I recently edited a special issue of Victorian Poetry on the salon (Summer 2022).

In the field of digital humanities, I am founder and co-director of a suite of digital projects, Sounding Victorian, and co-founder and co-director of another digital consortium, Tennysons Archive: Digitising the Work of the Tennysons, Plural. From July 2019 to June 2022, I served as Director of the Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Digital Humanities at Saint Louis University.

I was educated at the University of Sussex (DPhil) and University of Cambridge (BA, hons / MA) in England, and at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music (BA, hons; BM), and Interlochen Arts Academy (Vocal Performance) in the USA.

While I was ill early in the pandemic, my experiences motivated me to shift focus for a time to engage with creative nonfiction, medical humanities and patient experience. I chose to self-publish my memoir, The Arrow Tree: Healing from Long COVID in the belief that we needed such stories immediately, not post-pandemic. It was the first published long-hauler book-length memoir (April 2021). Luckily, I am well again.