My research specialization is Victorian literature and culture. I am particularly interested in illustration and visual cultures, aesthetics, ethics, religion, gender, textual criticism (scholarly editing), and the production of culture-texts (texts, such as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that are collectively known and “remembered” when the original works have not been read).

I am completing for Oxford University Press a SSHRC-funded monograph, Thomas Hardy and Visual Cultures. Other projects include the Cambridge Hardy edition of Jude the Obscure and a study of aesthetics, ethics, and material culture in Hardy’s fiction and poetry.

I have supervised Victorianist postdoctoral, Ph.D., M.A., and Honours research on a wide variety of topics, including: Hopkins’s atmospheric poetics; Barrett Browning’s languages of resistance; Hardy and the blush; the transatlantic politics of art; Victorian spiritualism; Dickens and psychology; Christina Rossetti’s theology; the visualization of disordered eating in Victorian children’s literature; adaptations and revisionings of the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy.

I received my B.A. from the University of Victoria, my M.A. from the University of Toronto, and my D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. At UBC I was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and then a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow before taking up a faculty position.

I have been awarded a Killam Research Prize and a Killam Teaching Prize, and am a Distinguished University Scholar.

Research Networks:

The Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens

The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy

Selected publications

• “‘A hitherto unperceived beauty’: Aesthetics, Ethics, and the Material in The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Keynote lecture, 2024 International Thomas Hardy Conference, Thomas Hardy Journal, forthcoming
• “‘The light that never was’: Memory, Beauty, and the Transformation of the Everyday in Thomas Hardy’s Late Lyrics,” Thomas Hardy: Text and Image, forthcoming
• “Illustration,” Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Phillip Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2013), 54-70
• “‘The Hard Case of the Would-Be-Religious’: Hardy and the Church from Early Life to Later Years,” A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 71-85
• Thomas Hardy’s “Poetical Matter” Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2009)
• “The Gospel According to Hardy,” Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, ed. Keith Wilson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006), 3-19; extract published in Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2006, 12-13
• “Anxieties of Representation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51.1 (1996): 84-110; reprinted in The Return of the Native: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, ed. Phillip Mallett (New York: Norton, 2006), 489-504
• “Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jane? Revisioning Gender in The Mayor of Casterbridge,” Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. Phillip Mallett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 64-86