My research interests currently centre on various aspects of the metropolitan city, especially at nighttime. My most recent book is Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (Verso, 2015), the first instalment of an attempt to reconstruct a cultural history of the urban subject at night, from the Middle Ages to the present, in order to present an alternative to the modernist myth of the flâneur. I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2012-13 to pursue this research. The book is indirectly linked both to Restless Cities, the collection of essays I edited with Gregory Dart in 2010, and to the City Centre I set up in the English Department at UCL in 2010, which has now become the Cities Imaginaries strand of the UCL Urban Laboratory, of which I am a Co-Director. In addition to working on London and other metropolitan cities at night, this time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I am working on a scholarly edition of Walter Pater's The Renaissance for OUP's Collected Works of Walter Pater.