Personal Statement
I studied at the University of St Andrews at undergraduate and postgraduate level, completing my doctorate in 2007. After one year at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, as the Past and Present Society’s Postdoctoral Fellow, I arrived in Liverpool in October 2008 on a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. I was then appointed to a permanent position as Lecturer in 2010, earning promotion to Professor in 2018.

I am primarily interested in the history of reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using the practice and experience of reading in the past as a key to understanding much broader social and cultural processes across the English-speaking world. My research on the history of reading and libraries (including four books and more than twenty peer-reviewed essays) has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and I am currently leading a £1m digital humanities project on eighteenth-century libraries with collaborators and partners across the UK, USA and Australia.