My early reputation as a researcher was made on the basis of the work I published within literary and cultural theory, especially my extremely successful book for Routledge's The New Critical Idiom, Intertextuality, a second edition of this book including a newly commissioned chapter was published in 2011.

In 2008 I published my monograph on Mary Shelley and an accompanying student book on Frankenstein. This fact, alongside the increased number of articles and chapters on Romantic literature, demonstrate that I am now publishing significant work in both of these highly intensive and demanding fields. I am planning monographs  on the collaborative relationship between the Shelleys, and on the philosophical and literary work of William Godwin. 

My work in literary and cultural theory has undoubtedly had an international impact. My monograph on Harold Bloom (1994) led to an invitation to co-edit the 2007 Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, beyond any doubt the most important and inclusive work yet to be published on Bloom. As already stated, my work on intertextuality, which in many respects includes the book on Roland Barthes, has brought me an international audience. Between them Intertextuality and Roland Barthes have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Persian and Indonesian. In 2011, a second edition of Intertextuality, including a new chapter updating its coverage, was published by Routledge. This work has also led to numerous invitations to contribute to publications and conferences and also constitutes my most cited publication.

Emerging from my work on intertextuality, I have, in recent years, increasingly developed a new strand of research on theories of adaptation, in particular, novel-to-film adaptation. This research has so far concentrated on the work of Stanley Kubrick. Since 2015, I have published a number of articles and chapters in this field, spending time at the Kubrick archive in the University of London, Arts, and attending major conferences and symposia. My plan is to publish a major monograph entitled Stanley Kubrick: The Genius of Adaptation. 

I also contribute to the School of English's increasing profile in creative writing. I have been publishing my creative work, mainly my poetry, since December 2006, and my on-going epoem Holes along with my first two collections The One That Got Away (2014), and The Madhouse System (2016) were published by New Binary Press. I won the 2010 Listowel Single Poem Prize for the title poem of The One That Got Away and the collection has been shortlisted for the following: Second Fish International Poetry Prize (2007), Listowel First Collection Prize (2008), The Crashaw Prize (2013), the Fool For Poetry Prize (2014) and the Strong/Shine First Collection Prize (2015). I was part of the Poetry Ireland Rising Generation collection (2016), my poem Bright Star Elegy for David Bowie was RTE Poem of the Week in December 2016, and was also a recommended poem for the inaugural RTE Poem of the Year (2016).