I am Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent where I teach, research and writes about women's writing, history, work, dress, craft and material culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I am the author or co-editor of eight books. My most recent work includes The Lady's Magazine and the Making of Literary History, which was published on open access by Edinburgh University Press in 2022 and the popular history-craft book Jane Austen Embroidery (co-devised with Alison Larkin), which came out with Pavilion in the UK and Dover in the US in 2020.
I have a longstanding commitment to public humanities and open access. In 2016, I launched an international Stitch Off for which people recreated rare, surviving embroidery patterns from the Lady’s Magazine that I had discovered for an exhibition to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma. I have created numerous open-access digital resources around eighteenth-century women's writing and history and regularly give public talks and run workshops on these topics and discuss them in magazines, podcasts, radio and TV.
I am an experienced grant reviewer for international funders in Arts and Humanities (Leverhulme, AHRC, SSHRC, FWO etc.) and since 2020 have been a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. I sit on various editorial boards and am Patron of the Kent Branch of the Jane Austen Society.
Since January 2020, I have been EDI Director for English at Kent and outside my work for the University have worked with charities and advocacy groups around the rights of disabled children and their families and in 2013 was part of a parliamentary enquiry into some of these issues.