Having retired from the Department of English at the University of Bristol I am an independent scholar based in Oxford and London. I first specialised in Victorian poetry, especially the work of Robert Browning. More recently I have concentrated on the reception of classical antiquity in English and Modern Greek literature; I am also interested in English-Greek literary relations from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
These pages describe some of my current and earlier projects.
Publications and papers include:
- “Ezra Pound’s Ragbag: The Cantos as Cento”, in Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of
Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong! ed. Manuel Baumbach (Trier, 2022), pp. 21-40
- “Heaney and Hesiod”, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses, ed. Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, and Helen
Eastman (OUP, 2019), pp. 38-49
- “Poem as Inscription: Ezra Pound to Ian Hamilton Finlay”,
Fleshing Out Words, University of Warwick, March 2019
- “Starlight and Electric Light: Seamus Heaney’s Greece”, in Landscapes of Irish and Greek Poets, ed. Joanna Kruczkowska (Oxford: Lang,
2018), pp. 31-49
- “I sailed never with Cadmus: Modernism’s Thebes”, Classical Association Conference, Leicester, April 2018
- (with Rose Little) “‘In
a Different Light’: Imagining Greece in Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym”, in Greece in British Women’s Literary Imagination 1913-2013, ed. Eleni Papargyriou et al. (Lang, 2017)
- “Betty Radice and the Survival of Classics”, in Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly,
ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall (OUP, 2016), pp. 345-57
- “Tin Wreaths and Broken Statues: Ezra Pound, Commemoration and the Classical
Text”, UCL, June 2015
- “William Rothenstein: The Artist as Reader”, Cartwright Hall, Bradford, March 2015
- “Plato,
Seferis and Heaney: Poetry as Redress”, in Re-Imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, ed. Dimitris Tziovas (OUP, 2014), pp. 318-29.
- “Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour and the Fall
of Crete” University of Cambridge, June 2014
- “‘Si credere dignum est’:
Crediting the Georgics from Browning to Hill”, UCL, April 2014
- “Joyce’s Greek”, Durham University, July 2013.
I also continue to work on Edward Lear, bringing together the written and visual records of his Greek travels: the Cretan Journal, the Grecian travels of 1848 and the journeys in Greece and Albania in 1856 and 1857. A compendium site of all Lear’s journeys in “Greek lands” is under construction.
Other research interests have included:
- Women Writers (especially Virginia Woolf)
- The history and literary uses of the English dictionary
- Probability, Statistics and the Literary Text.
To contact me
click here.
Website maintained by: Rowena Fowler
Last updated: 24 June 2022