Before coming to Waterloo, I was Assistant Professor at Butler University in Indiana, and before that, Instructor at Auburn University in Alabama. I did my BA and MA at McMaster, majoring in English with a minor concentration in Religious Studies for both degrees. My MA thesis was on medieval dream visions. I continued to live in the mystical past by pursuing my PhD on Blake at King's College, Cambridge, where I was an acolyte in the beautiful Gothic chapel. I'm originally from Hamilton, so being at St. Jerome's is like coming home -- both geographically and intellectually, since here, as well as my speciality in Romanticism and my interest in theology and medievalism, I can also indulge my love of Canadian literature. I've given lectures on Can Lit at various universities in Japan, and at St. Jerome's I co-organize the Canada Council-funded Reading Series.

Selected Publications

Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture co-edited with Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011.

“‘He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Blake and Jim Morrison” Blake 2.0.

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability. Culture, Disease, and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness series. Bristol: Intellect, forthcoming 2011.

“‘Mother of Unworthy Woe’: Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women’s Poetry and Midwifery Books” Spectacular Death

Queer Blake, co-edited with Helen Bruder. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

“‘Fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic” Queer Blake

Liberating Medicine, 1720-1835, co-edited with Steve Clark. The Enlightenment World series. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.

“Anna Barbauld’s ‘To a Little Invisible Being…’: Maternity in Poetry and Medicine” Liberating Medicine

"Transgender Juvenilia: Blake's and Cristall's Poetical Sketches" Women Read William Blake, edited by Helen Bruder. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 26-34.

"'The Authority of the Ancients': Blake and Wilkins' Translation of the Bhagavad Gita" The Reception of Blake in the Orient, edited by Masashi Suzuki and Steve Clark. London: Continuum, 2006. 145-58.

William Blake and the Body. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

"Miscarriage Imagery in Blake" Romanticism 7.2 (2002). 145-62.

Fellowships & Awards

Distinguished Teacher Award, University of Waterloo, 2010

CIHR Operating Grant, "City Life and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness". Co-investigator, researching "Midwifery and Collective Representations of the Reproductive Body". Primary investigator: Alan Blum. Project based at UW. 2006-2011.

Government of Canada Department of Foreign Affairs Cultural Personalities Exchange Program grant for lecture tour of Japan. 2006.

St. Jerome's University Faculty Research Grant. 2005.

Butler University Awards Committee Faculty Fellowship. 2005.

SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. 1998-1999.

IODE War Memorial Postgraduate Scholarship. 1998-1999.

Commonwealth Scholarship. 1995-1998.

SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship 1995-1997. (declined due to Commonwealth Scholarship)

Ontario Graduate Scholarship. 1993-1994.

Henry Lyman Hooker Senior Fellowship, McMaster University. 1993-1994.

Centennial Entrance Scholarship, McMaster University. 1993-1994.

Current Research

My work on Blake continues to centre around gender and sexuality. Putting together Queer Blake inspired Helen Bruder and I to co-organize a conference, Blake, Gender and Sexuality in the Twenty-First Century, out of which two essay collections are developing: Blake, Gender and Culture (emphasizing historicist methodologies) and Sexy Blake (organized around themes such as sex and violence, sex and redemption, art and pornography). Also, with Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker, I'm pursuing a few interrelated editing projects, each made out of varying proportions of Blake, Romanticism, popular music and popular culture.

My research on literature and medicine has led to a fascination with Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), especially his Loves of the Plants which explains plant reproduction, and the Linnaean sexual system of taxonomy, through personification in a kind of vegetable soap-opera. I'm working on an edition of the text, as well as essays on its aesthetics as ornate, heavily footnoted didactic poetry, and its intriguing juxtaposition of cross-disciplinary form and cross-species desire.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

British Romantic literature and culture
William Blake

Gender and Sexuality

Maternity in literature
Medical writing and illustration
Literature and medicine
Body studies
Religion and literature