About me

I was educated at Oriel College, Oxford (BA, MSt, DPhil) and held research posts at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Leeds, and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies in London. After being a lecturer at various colleges in Oxford, I joined Cardiff University in 2007 and became Senior Lecturer in 2008. I founded the Poetry Research Network in 2011. My children were born in 2008 and 2012.

My research has always focused on German poetry. I have written a book about the relationship between political history and poetry, with respect to the ‘Wende’ of 1989 and the impact of unification. Further publications have explored questions of national identity, as expressed in poetry about urban landscapes; contemporary poetry about science; and the representation of the human body in poetry through different eras of the twentieth century. More recently, I have been working on poetry translation, especially in the GDR. I have also developed an ongoing project concerning how the Ophelia figure from Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been appropriated by German-language culture.

Contact me via email: poetryresearchnetwork[at]gmail.com