I am a Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures and Creative Communication Programme and have been at Te Herenga Waka since 2014. My current research and teaching sit at the intersection of nineteenth-century literary studies and the environmental humanities. I teach courses on nineteenth-century British and American literature, narrative theory, and literary engagements with ecology and climate change.

My first book—Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Ohio State UP, 2020)—reads works by Austen, Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy alongside changing notions of probability that accompanied the rise of statistics, showing how these novelists turned to chance as a narrative mechanism for capturing relationships and tensions across different scales of reality. 

With Anna Gibson (North Carolina State University), I am the co-director of Dickens Notes, an online, peer-reviewed scholarly edition of Charles Dickens’s working notes located at dickensnotes.org. Our open-access platform provides visually faithful transcriptions of these fascinating pages that Dickens used to manage the serial composition of his novels; extensive annotations and introductions allow users to encounter the energies that shaped Dickens’s novels as he conceived and published them, month-by-month. As we work to complete this edition with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) Scholarly Editions and Translations grant (2026–27), we are also writing a book that uses the working notes to re-trace the trajectory of Dickens’s career through the lens of compositional process.

In recent years, I have also been teaching and researching in the environmental humanities, exploring connections between climate change and nineteenth-century literature, history, and culture. I am actively involved in the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment, and Culture—Australia/New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ); I helped to organise the 2021 Conference “Ngā Tohu o te Huarere: Conversations Beyond Human Scales” here at THW, and am a member of the editorial collective for Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology.

I supervise Honours, MA, and PhD students working in areas related to my research interests.