I am a Senior Lecturer and Senior Teaching Fellow at the University
of Chester, where I was Head of English from 2004-2010, before
stepping down from that role to concentrate on research and
teaching. I specialize in literature and music, 1660-1770 and
1930-1990. My Ph.D (1985) was on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, and I have published on a range of late seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century authors (writing a survey of the whole
period in Studying English Literature, ed. Ashley Chantler
and David Higgins (London: Continuum, 2010)). In the modern period
a particular interest is the work of Samuel Beckett, with two
articles appearing in 2012 (“Textual Variants in Cascando:
An Argument for a Scholarly Edition” for the Journal of Beckett
Studies and “Federman’s Beckett: Two Voices in the Closet” for
Modernism/Modernity). Since 1993 I have completed over
thirty programmes for BBC Radio 3 on literature and music, with ten
programmes on Handel, and others featuring Monteverdi, Mozart,
Britten, Finzi, Holst and Vaughan Williams. The subjects of these
programmes have often been the composers’ adaptations of literary
sources. Handel has also been the subject of book chapters and an
article for The Musical Quarterly, “Artful Anthology: The
Use of Literary Sources for Handel’s Jephtha” (OUP, 2004).
I also co-authored, with Chris Walsh, a book on reader theory,
The Practice of Reading: Interpreting the Novel
(Macmillan, 1999). I have just completed a further article on
Beckett (and chess), and forthcoming research includes work on
variation in da capo aria form in Handel’s Italian operas.