I joined UCC in September 2025 as a Lecturer in Old English. Before joining the School of English and Digital Humanities, I held teaching posts at University College London, King’s College London and Manchester Metropolitan University. From 2020 to 2024 I was Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York, where I undertook an individual research project titled ‘Divine Abstraction: Medieval Modern Networks of Faith and Culture’. I was awarded my AHRC-funded PhD by King’s College London in 2018.

My research explores the meeting point between medieval and modern literary culture in the twentieth-century archive. I am interested both in how medieval texts shape communities of readers and forge identities, and how the material of the medieval past has allowed late modernist writers and artists to unearth radical, cross-cultural histories of British and Irish identity.

My first monograph, Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones (Oxford University Press, 2021), won the University English Book Prize 2022. I have also published on sensory perceptions of the early medieval liturgy in England; the influence of liturgical innovation on vernacular Passion poetry (both medieval and modernist); gendered relationships to space and place in the Old English elegies and the writing of Welsh artist-author Brenda Chamberlain; and medieval translation and recreation in the archives of Edwin Morgan. With Carl Kears I am co-editor of Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the medieval archive through creative and critical practice, which will be published Open Access by UCL Press in 2026.

In addition to my interests as a researcher, I am a poet and a writer with creative work published in PN Review, gorse, 3AM, and Propel Magazine, amongst others. These creative interests feed into my teaching and public engagement. With Fran Allfrey and Carl Kears, I co-run the Revoicing Medieval Poetry network, an ongoing collaborative project that includes cycles and sequences of workshops, labs, exchanges, readings and performances that carve out spaces for creative and collective engagements with medieval poetry and its materials. I’ve also worked with heritage institutions like the York Museums Trust and prize-winning writers including Anthony Vahni Capildeo and Rowan Evans to bring workshops to the public as well as students. In 2019-20 I was Academic Lead for the UCL Creative Fellowship Programme, 'New Old English: Performance, Poetry, Practice', which saw Fen develop their performance based on the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer in dialogue with staff and students at the university.

Research Grants