I came to Birmingham from the universities of Cambridge and Leeds; I studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, and held a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leeds.

Teaching and administration

I enjoy teaching across all three years of the undergraduate syllabus at Birmingham. I teach and lecture on the first-year Literature Foundation module; teach and lecture the second-year Generic Transformations module; and currently offer two third-year option modules, Early Modern Drama and Ben Jonson.

My postgraduate teaching includes teaching on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing within the English Literature MA module, Writing Revolutions; with Gillian Wright and Hugh Adlington I co-convene the seventeenth-century part of this module. In addition, I am currently co-supervising three doctoral students, one editing William Haughton's play Englishmen For My Money (with John Jowett), one exploring the varieties of dramatised male friendship in the early modern period (with Valerie Rumbold), and one working on impression and identity in Shakespeare (with John Jowett). I welcome enquiries from prospective students.

Since the academic year 2006-7 I have been Joint Honours Admissions Tutor for English, and from the start of 2009 have been the Senior Admissions Officer for the School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies.

Research

My research explores the relationships between Renaissance writers and their later readers, and the material forms in which these and other textual exchanges take place. My first book, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (Oxford University Press, 2005), explores the many forms in which Jonson is mobile within the Romantic period. My next book, Shakespeare and his Texts (under contract as an Arden Critical Companion to Shakespeare) will provide an introduction to the material documents by which Shakespeare's plays and poems are transmitted, and will explore the implications of these material documents for our understanding of Shakespeare today. I see Shakespeare and his Texts as part of a larger, long-term research project concerning the ways in which understandings of Renaissance writers and their texts have transformed by the history of the their productions, publication and readership. I am interested in the ways in which an historicised understanding of the textual cultures that produced these editions can be related to our and their developing understanding of early modern textual culture.

My interests in manuscript and print, and in the later reception of early modern writers, have shaped much of my recent and current research. I have published articles on poetic and dramatic manuscripts from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; one of these, 'The Sheridans at Work' was awarded The Review of English Studies Essay Prize for 2003.  In December 2008 I spoke on 'Milton in the Twentieth Century' at the British Academy's celebration of Milton's quatercentenary, and in October 2009 I will deliver the Chatterton Lecture on English Poetry at the British Academy, speaking on the title 'Donne, By Hand'.

Books

• Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (Oxford University Press, 2005) .

Articles

• ' "All Hayle to Hatfeild": A New Series of Country House Poems from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 44 [with text]', English Literary Renaissance, 38 (2008), 270-303.
• 'The Sheridans at Work Again: The Wallace Manuscript of The Siege of St Quintin ', The Review of English Studies, 58 (2007), 89-93.
• '"The hazzard of grosse mistakes in ignorant Transcribers": A New Manuscript Text of Sir Robert Stapylton's Musaeus on the Loves of Hero and Leander ', English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700, 13 (2007), 250-69.
• 'Manuscript, Print, and the Authentic Shakespeare: The Ireland Forgeries Again', Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge, 2006), 108-23.
• 'The Sheridans at Work: A Recovered Drury Lane Revisal of 1808', The Review of English Studies, 55 (2004), 487-97, winner of The Review of English Studies Essay Prize 2003; a text is available online here .
• 'Edmond Malone and Early Modern Textual Culture', The Yale University Library Gazette, 79 (2004), 53-69.
• 'Francis Godolphin Waldron and Ben Jonson's The Sad Shepherd', The Library, 7th series, 3 (2002), 390-412.

Introductions

• Arden of Faversham, introd. Tom Lockwood, playtext ed. Martin White, New Mermaids (London : A&C Black, 2007)

Shorter articles and notes

• 'Survey of the Text' (in collaboration with David Gants), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, general editors David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• 'Works (1692)', 'Works (1716-7)', 'Works (1756)' and 'Works (1816)' [bibliographical essays], The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, general editors David Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• 'New Allusions to Jonson and Sidney', Notes & Queries, n.s. 52 (2005), 227-29.
• 'Sir Thomas North', The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), 41.119-22.
• 'Theatrical Jonson', Essays in Criticism, 50 (2000), 273-80 (review essay).

Reviews have appeared in The Library, The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, BARS Review & Bulletin, Early Modern Literary Studies, New Theatre Quarterly and Renaissance Journal. I am currently the Renaissance and Early Modern Section Editor for Routledge's Annotated Bibliography of English Studies.

Postgraduate supervision

I am interested in supervising MA, MPhil and PhD candidates in the following areas and will be pleased to respond to enquiries:

• Ben Jonson and his contemporaries
• The relationships of Renaissance and Romantic writers
• The relationships of manuscript and print
• Early modern poetry and drama