University of Greenwich

Faculty Member, Communication and Creative Arts

Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies

About

After a degree in classical and medieval Latin (when I spent most of my time studying Wagner, Strauss, Mahler and Berg rather than Horace, Virgil, the Carmina Burana or Aquinas), and an MA in Medieval Studies (both at Reading), I taught English at the University of Catania for most of the 1980s (now writing music for a semi-professional theatre group in Sicily). There I met Prof. Alba Floreale (Nini Marangolo). She became a dear friend and mentor and her influence still lasts well beyond her untimely death. I then did a 2nd MA in English at Sussex, where, querying Foucault's stress on high-status sources in La Volunte de savoir and seeking alternative views of Victorian society, I discovered the joys of mass-market periodicals. I eventually did a part-time PhD on one of them under the amazingly energetic and energising Laurel Brake at Birkbeck.
In 2003, I joined the Media Department of Canterbury Christ Church University.
2008-9 I was lucky enough to be awarded a stipendiary research fellowship at the English Department, University of Ghent, Belgium which resulted in (amongst other things) a special number of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (September 2009) on the relationship of the nineteenth-century press to the professions, with the extraordinary Marysa Demoor.

In May 2012 I joined the Department of Communication and Creative Arts at the University of Greenwich as Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies.

My current research is focussed on the nineteenth-century mass-market novelist Ouida, on whom Jane Jordan (Kingston) and I are in the final stages of editing a collection of essays for Ashgate.

I've already started work on my next big project, which is on the global circulation of pre-Hollywood mass-market narrative: how can we understand its amazing reach and the kind of semantic flexibility which enables it to be translated across continents, cultures and languages?

Rather more distant are my dreams of writing a book on opera and its excesses. This is a remnant of my youth that resists all current social forces -- and perhaps persists for that very reason.