My research interests are in premodern (late-medieval and early-modern, c. 1350-1700), Scottish and English literatures, especially poetry and poetics. As a practisioner of book-history, I am interested in the intersections between the book as material text and as literary artefact. I also continue to be engaged with Digital Humanities projects. Over the last year I have also become active in the spatial humanities: for instance the relationship between literature and geography, and how literary texts frame our experience of space and place. 

I am especially busy with two current projects: in 2023/24 I held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for a project called Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland. This will result in a book with chapters on e.g., 'Wild Places'; 'Travelling Places', and 'Place and Nation'. A supporting web resource (Place and Poetry in Premodern Scotland) produced in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland contains mini-editions of Scottish poems alongside historical maps. 

With Steven Reid and Sìm Innes (Glasgow), I completed a British Academy Small Grant funded, proof-of-concept database and research project, the Literatures of Older Scotland Database (LOSD), a digital first-line index of Scottish poetry in Scots, Latin, and Gaelic. We are currently planning to move to a much more ambitious resource of this kind. 

My first book The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560-1625 (Oxford University Press 2016) won the Saltire Society's 'Scottish Research Book of the Year 2016' award. I am still at work, with Peter McCullough, on the Textual Companion volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (c. 2025/6). With Noah Millstone (Birmingham) I completed (in October 2018) the AHRC-funded project 'Manuscript Pampleteering in Early Stuart England'. Other ongoing and forthcoming work includes articles and book chapters on river poetry, Scottish renaissance lyric, book illustration, seventeenth-century Scottish miscellanies, and the impact of Scots poetics on early-Stuart English literary culture.

I co-founded (2015) and now co-convene the Early Modern Studies Research cluster at Bristol.  

Editing / STS / Boards

From 2009 to 2014, I was co-editor (and co-founder) of the Open Access electronic Journal of the Northern Renaissance. I am also an Executive Member of Council (with a responsibility for all things digital) for the Scottish Text Society. I am an advisory board member for the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS) project, based at the University of Regina, Canada. I was an external examiner at the University of Edinburgh; member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and sat on an advisory panel for a major upcoming exhibition at the British Library. I have peer reviewed publications for, e.g., Oxford University Press, Manchester University Press, Routledge, Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Scottish Literary Review, Studies in Scottish Literature, and more.