About

Profile

I have recently completed and submitted my PhD thesis at Edge Hill University. My PhD project, which was undertaken in collaboration with the British Library, was supported financially by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Partnership award. It aims to reassess orthodox determinations of success and failure in the nineteenth-century press by considering afresh the representative role of short-lived newspapers, especially in the London area, during the century.

Research Interests

My passion is the nineteenth-century print media, especially in the back-stories behind newspapers with particular emphasis on the swathes of short-lived titles (lasting five years or less in print). I’m curious about who was behind them, why they launched them, how they did it and the circumstances that led to their closure. In more general terms, though, my research interests are –

• The industrial, political and societal culture of the long nineteenth century
• The development of print culture in the nineteenth century, including the popular press
• The digital humanities, especially as applied to archival research
• The development of crime narratives, including detective fiction as well as factual/journalistic accounts of crime
• Subversives and morally ambiguous characters in English cultural history and literature
• Shakespeare’s work as drama and also how the cultural significance of his work developed, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries