I studied English Literature at the University of Manchester for my Undergraduate and Postgraduate degrees, and attained my PhD, which was on the manuscript travel writing of Dorothy Richardson (1748-1819), in 2002. I have over 20 years of experience working in Higher Education

My principal research interests are travel writing, and poetic and prose depictions of landscape and place more generally, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. I am also very interested in book history, manuscript culture, and networks of authorship and reading. My current work includes exploration of literary depictions of the British coastline. I would be happy to supervise postgraduate work in any of the fields mentioned above.

Teaching Specialisms:

I mainly teach eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, although I enjoy teaching at all levels, including on the first-year undergraduate course on which we study a wide range of work from different historical periods. In recent years I have worked with final-year students to support their advanced research work for independent research projects and dissertations. I also very much enjoy postgraduate teaching, which includes exploring literature related to Liverpool and the north of England more generally. 

School/Faculty Roles:

I have been Chair of the School of Humanities Research Committee for a number of years, and have recently taken up the position of Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Knowledge Exchange for the Faculty of Creative Arts and Humanities. I coordinate MA provision for English Literature, and am the staff representative for English Literature at our Student Voice Committee. 

Recent publications and projects:

For many years now I have had the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues working on travel writing in other Liverpool universities, and I am one of the co-founders of the Liverpool Travel Seminar which has developed a network of scholars interested in travel writing in and beyond Liverpool. Publications which are the product of that collaboration include Keywords for Travel Writing Studies which I co-edited with Charles Forsdick and Kate Walchester, and a special issue on Vertical Travel in Studies in Travel Writing (see below). I am also a member of the DFG-funded Traveling Bodies Research Network at the University of Koblenz.

Recent publications include:

'Grand Tours and Sentimental Journeys', in Europe in British Literature and Culture, ed. Petra Rau and William Rossiter (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, eds, Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (Anthem Press, 2024).

‘“Foot foundered & broken down”: Painful Pedestrianism in John Clare’s “Journey out of Essex”’, in Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (see above).

'Cutting and Pasting the Popular Press: The Scrapbooks of Dorothy Richardson (1748-1819)', in The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 96.1 (Spring 2020): 77-98.

Charles Forsdick, Zoe Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester, eds, Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary (London: Anthem Press, 2019).

'Home Tour', ‘Margins’, Picturesque’, and ‘Tourism’ in Forsdick, Kinsley and Walchester, eds, Keywords for Travel Writing Studies, pp.119-21; 142-4; 184-6; 253-5.

'Travelogues, Diaries, Letters', in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp.408-22

'"He swam very strong": Cowper's "The Castaway" and the Voyage Account Tradition of Maritime Suffering', in The Cowper and Newton Journal, 8 (2018), pp.42-55.