I am always interested to hear about forthcoming events and can offer to speak at public events, study days, and symposia. Here is a list of some of my previous lectures and public appearances.
Literary Festivals and Study Days
‘Richard Jefferies’, in conversation with Andrew Rossabi, for the Garden Museum of London’s Literary Festival, July 2018
‘Richard Jefferies: A Victorian Countryman’, for Richard Jefferies Today, with Rebecca Welshman, at the Swindon Festival of Literature, 6 May 2010
‘Connections and Inspirations: the Influence of Richard Jefferies on Writers and Poets’. Paper presented for the Richard Jefferies Study Day, June 2017
‘“Life is a Game of Chess”: Hardy, Games and Prehistoric Landscapes,’ presented as part of the National Trust and Hardy Country Seminar Series, 30 October 2014, Dorset County Museum
‘“Objects of the Inner Eye”: Personal archaeology and emotions in the work of ThomasHardy’, The Thomas Hardy Society Birthday Lecture, 7 June 2014‘
“The Old House at Coate”: Literary Voyages at the Birthplace of Richard Jefferies(1848-1887)’, 2 April 2014. The Centre for Writing Place and History, University of Gloucestershire
‘Imagining Archaeology: Nature and Landscape in the work of Richard Jefferies’, The Richard Jefferies Society Birthday Lecture, 6 November 2012
‘Thomas Hardy and Geology’, at the symposium ‘Poetry and Geology’, hosted by The Geological Society
‘‘Richard Jefferies and Sport’, Richard Jefferies Study Day, July 2011
Papers presented at Conferences
‘The Hoar Apple Tree of the Battle of Hastings: A New Translation’. Theatres of War: the British Commission for Military History’s New Researchers’ Conference, Lancaster University, 8-9 November 2019
‘Violet and Crimson: Feminist Colour Aesthetics in Night and Day’, A Night and Day Symposium, University of Westminster, 26 October 2019
“Walled-In: the Psychology of the English Garden in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Rachel Cusk’s The Country Life’, with Nicolas Boileau (Aix-Marseille University).Landscape/Cityscape: Writing/Painting/Imagining Situational Identity in British Literature and Visual Arts (18th-21st centuries). SEAC-SAIT conference, 19-21 October 2017. London, Senate House
‘Richard Jefferies: Environmental catastrophe and the human place in After London (1885)’, Havant Literary Festival, 12 October 2014. Part of a panel with Professor Adeline Johns-Putra, Helen Moore, and Naomi Foyle, about ecologically-inspired literature and climate change
‘“Haunted by ghosts of white marble”: Bloomsbury in Crisis’, Modernist Communities, hosted by the French Society of Modernist Studies, Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, April 2014
‘“You may dissect your frog, but you cannot make it hop’: the Experimental Imagination of Virginia Woolf’. Study Day of the Woolf Society, Institut de Catholique, Paris, 25 October 2013
‘“He drove me back as if I were a bull breaking fence”: Folklore and Archaeology in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)’, The Institute of Archaeology and the Folklore Society, 3rd annual joint Folklore & Archaeology conference, UCL,12-13 October 2013
‘Texts, Time and the Environment: A Reading of the Philosophy of Richard Jefferies(1848–1887)’ in the session: ‘Nature, Time and Environmental Management’. NewGeographical Frontiers, Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, 27-30 August, 2013
‘“Objects of the Inner Eye”: Archaeology and Emotions in the work of Thomas Hardy’, The Rural Experience: Country Life in Literature, Song, Film and Folklore,26-28 March 2013
“Voiceless Dwellers in the Houseless Woods”: Literature, Communication and Rural Sustainability’, Literature and Sustainability, University of Wales Trinity St. David, Lampeter, 15 March 2013‘
Emma and the Mystery of the Gold Necklace’, Thomas Hardy in Cornwall, Mini-conference, March 7-10, 2013
‘Mapping Ancient Landscapes: the archaeological experience of place in the works of Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies’, Mapping the Self: Place, Identity, Nationality, 15 December 2012, Oxford Brookes University
‘Realising Relics: Archaeology in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Popular Antiquities: Folklore and Archaeology, UCL 13–14 October, 2012
‘“Dreams of Celtic Kings”: Victorian Prehistory and the Notion of Celtic’, Inaugural Exeter Humanities Postgraduate Researcher Conference, 30 April–1 May, University of Exeter
‘“When ideas came into natural history, it ceased to be natural history, and became philosophy”: Richard Jefferies’ ecological imagination and the consciousness of place', a themed panel of three papers coordinated and presented at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment postgraduate conference, Birkbeck, London, 11 September 2011‘
Nature’s Archaeologist: Richard Jefferies’ Ecological Philosophy’, Species, Space and the Imagination of the Global, Ninth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Bloomington, Indiana, 21-26 June 2011
‘Imagining the Ancient Britons: Victorian Adventures in Wye-Land’, English & Welsh Diaspora, Loughborough University, 13-16 April 2011‘
“Prehistoric Times”: Marriage and the Ancient Earth’, International Thomas Hardy Conference and Festival, 4 July 2010
‘“Dreams of Celtic Kings”: Victorian Prehistory and the Notion of Celtic’, Mysticism, Myth and Nationalism, University of Exeter, Tremough, 28 July 2010
‘Hillforts in times of War: Lost Cultural Spaces’, International World Archaeological Congress, Archaeology in Conflict, Vienna, 10 April 2010
‘Imagining Archaeology during the Great Agricultural Depression’, Nature and the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Edinburgh, 16 January 2010
‘Literature and the Ecological Imagination: Richard Jefferies and D.H. Lawrence’, Crossing the Line: Affinities before and after 1900, University of Liverpool, 05January 2010
“Realising Relics: Archaeology in the Early Nineteenth Century”, plenary panel paper, Romantic Disorder: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1750-1850,Birkbeck, London, 18-20 June 2009
“Travelling in an Instant across the Distant Sea”: Coast as Setting in the Work of Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy”’, Land and Identity, University of Derby, 16 May 2009
‘Hardy, Jefferies, and the Imaginative Reading of Nature’, Reading and the Age of Gladstone, St. Deiniol’s Library in association with the University of Liverpool, 23-25January 2009
‘Comprehending the Void: Richard Jefferies and Transcendental Ideology in The Story of My Heart, Disrupting Victorian Studies: Inconvenient Facts, Shocking Discoveries, Surprising Events, Forgotten Voices, Unknown Writings, Mangled Texts, NAVSA and Victorians Institute conference, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 3-4 October 2008
‘Imagining Archaeology: Hardy and the Bronze Age’, Thomas Hardy Conference Postgraduate Symposium, July 2008
Media Interviews
Interview ‘The Ridgeway and Richard Jefferies’, with Sir Tony Robinson, for Channel 4, Walking through History programme, June 2016
Interview, BBC Radio Bristol, September 2012, ‘Richard Jefferies’
Interview for Radio 4, ‘Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas’, for ‘Edward Thomas and the Pursuit of Spring’, with Matthew Oates, nature conservationist for the National Trust, and produced by Andrew Dawes of the BBC Wildlife and Natural History Unit, Easter 2013