I am a Senior Research Fellow and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at All Souls College, Oxford, where I am also Fellow Librarian.

I was at Bristol Grammar School before I took my BA in English Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1985. I completed a D. Phil. in 1989 at New College, Oxford, on 'The English Humanist Epic 1580-1614', having returned to Caius as a research fellow in 1987. In 1989 I became a teaching fellow in English at Caius and a University Lecturer in the Faculty of English. I served as Tutor and Director of Studies, and became a Reader in Renaissance and Comparative Literature in 2003. At Cambridge I lectured on Tragedy, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and on Early Tudor and Late Elizabethan literature, as well as on a number of topics in classical literature, and ran a number of aspiration raising and outreach initiatives. At All Souls I do some lecturing in the Faculty of English and supervise graduate students, but principally I focus on my research. I also serve as one of the editors of The Review of English Studies, and review regularly for The London Review of Books, which is always fun.

I am mainly a literary critic rather than an historian or an editor. My main area of research lies in the relations between Renaissance literature and its classical forebears, though I also have active research interests in early Tudor literature, Spenser, Jonson, Milton, in Shakespeare, and in contemporary poetry and poetics. I have also edited a number of texts, particular the poetic works of early modern writers who are principally remembered as dramatists (Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marston).

I am presently writing a history of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English Literary History, of which I am (with Jonathan Bate) General Editor. I am also completing an edition of snarling satires and other poems for the Oxford Edition of the Works of John Marston. 

Essays in the pipeline include a piece on poetry and political advice from Wyatt to Hill, an essay on what 'practical criticism' looked like in the Elizabethan period, and a piece about a hitherto unknown translation from Boccaccio which I discovered in the binding of a book in the Codrington Library.

My present work in progress includes:

• The Elizabethans, for the Oxford English Literary History
• The Poems of John Marston, for the Oxford Edition of the Works of John Marston
• Elizabethan Practical Criticism, for Poetics Before Modernity, ed. Micha Lazarus and Vladimir Brljak
• Sixteenth Century Poetry, for The Oxford Handbook of Renaissance Poetry, ed. Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher
• A Rediscovered Translation from Boccaccio
• Elijah Fenton's Copy of Spenser
• Political Advice, Wyatt to Geoffrey Hill