Faculty Member, Classics and Ancient History
Lecturer in Reception
About
I have an interdisciplinary post in the Arts Faculty at Bristol and teach in the departments of Classics & Ancient History and English Literature. My research focuses on Latin hexameter poetry, particularly the complex interrelationship between Vergil's Georgics and Aeneid and Lucan's De Bello Ciuili. In relation to these authors, I have published on two main areas. Firstly, the construction of political space and historical time; here I draw primarily on the work of the canonical critical theorists Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Secondly, gender and sexuality, particularly as it relates to models of reception as 'legacy' or 'inheritance'.
My research is currently shifting from a focus on the politics of reception to a focus on the erotics of reception. My work on reception theory, which is informed by deconstruction, semiotics, post-structuralism, and feminism and queer and trans theory, explores the way people read and use texts. I'm interested in reading as a crossing point between the intensely personal (the ways in which we relate texts to our worlds and our lives) and the intensely political/public (the ways in which our cultural, institutional, and social contexts make different modes of reading available for different people at different times). At the moment I'm especially interested in fannish, excessive, devoted, passionate readings. I'm a member of the Society of the Friends of the Text, which is an informal network of fans, independent scholars, and academics who are also interested in those things.
I am currently on research leave, writing a book on reception theory: my next research project, A New Life, will develop Barthes' theories about the erotics of reading via a close engagement with Dante's Divine Comedy.
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