I research on medieval French and English literature, both separately and comparatively. I am always particularly interested in relations between medieval literature and modern critical theory (especially but not exclusively francophone).

My current project is on Form in Translation – in which the understanding both of ‘form’ and of ‘translation’ are ongoing questions. I am interested in thinking about how literary form translates in medieval texts and manuscripts, in how forms are laid out in manuscripts, and in the affective, literary and philosophical consequences. My corpus covers Old and Middle French (both continental and 'insular', that is, 'Anglo-Norman' (earlier) and 'Anglo-French' (later)), Middle English and Latin, and includes texts and manuscripts from the 11th to the 15th centuries.

I am preparing an article, 'Singing in (Different) Tongues' following two conference papers, about linguistic and formal code-switching (alexandrine laisses/tail-rhyme, English and French), in the 'chronicle' of Pierre de (Peter) Langtoft and its manuscripts, relating this to ideas about 'sonic warfare'. I am currently especially interested in brackets (honestly!)as marking – or rather as creating – form. Here are examples from two manuscripts from England (there are continental examples also):

https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GG-00001-00001/792

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90609217/f100.image

I discuss these in ‘Form and/as Mode of Existence’, Romanic Review, 111.1 (2020), 27-47, approaching brackets via Bruno Latour's Inquiry into Modes of Existence, http://modesofexistence.org/.

       If you have examples of brackets in manuscripts, please do send me details, I would be very glad to hear from you.

I am currently working on papers and articles relating early French literary prose to early photography, via Roland Barthes’s writings.

I have also done some preliminary work on alexandrines in the light of Giorgio Agamben's work (published in Exemplaria in 2015, details under 'Publications'), and intend to develop this. I plan also to look at prosimetrum and/or lyric insertion.

I was a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded 2011-2015 project, Medieval Francophone Literature Outside France, http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk/ The project monograph, co-authored with Bill Burgwinkle (Cambridge) and Simon Gaunt (KCL), is forthcoming with OUP: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/medieval-french-literary-culture-abroad-9780198832454?cc=gb&lang=en&

       In this context, I am interested especially in links between northern France, the Low Countries, England, the Rhineland and Savoy. The themes that attract me are especially translatio, translation and metamorphosis, legendary histories/historical myths and their relation to fiction, ways of thinking about community, and prophecy.