Postgraduate research students

My research is interested in reorienting J.R.R. Tolkien and British Romantic studies by examining how Romanticism and its legacies shaped Tolkien’s Middle-earth corpus and its adaptations. The thesis challenges each field's preconceptions and provides a new set of literary coordinates for studying how Tolkien and British Romanticism's legacies intersect, bringing an up-to-date understanding of Romanticism into conversation with Tolkien's works, critical heritage, and ongoing influence. This timely project will further explore how Tolkien’s transmutations of Romanticism make his work a nexus of meaning that help fan communities negotiate national and ecological tensions and crises.

My broader research interests include: 

• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature
• British Romanticism and Romantic legacies
• Neo-Romantic arts and culture
• Environmental humanities
• Antiquarianism and Forgery
• Fantasy and speculative literature
• Cornish arts, culture, and history

List by: Type | Date

• Professor Dimitra Fimi
• Professor Matthew Sangster

• BARS 'Stephen Copley Research Award', £500 to conduct research into the Tolkien Library at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2024).
• Tolkien Society Bursary, £500 to attend and present at the Tolkien 2019 Conference (2019).

Invited Guest Lectures

• University of Edinburgh, presenting ‘The Metanarratives of The Lord of the Rings’, November 2024.
• University of Oxford's Tolkien 50th Anniversary Seminar Series, presenting ‘"I am a link in the chain": Victorian Transformations of British Romanticism and their Influence on Tolkien’, May 2024.

Public Talks & Podcast Appearances 

• Wine & Wonders Knowledge Exchange at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, presenting ‘"Knowledge does not dispel mystery": Fantastically Gothic Mountain Worlds', October 2024.
• Seed Talks, presenting ‘The Epic History of The Lord of the Rings’, May 2024 to present
• Blake Society's Global Blake Podcast, co-presenting ‘Blake and Tolkien’s Mythmaking’, March 2024, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uFYcj2FHcY.
• Upper St. Clair Township Library, Pittsburgh, presenting ‘The Romantic Roots of Middle-earth: How Tolkien Created his Mythology’, January 2024.
• A Long-Expected Soundscape Holiday Online Special, presenting ‘The Road Goes On: Romantic Walking in Middle-earth’, December 2023.
• British Library's Fantasy Exhibition Installation at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, presenting ‘The Road Goes On: Romantic Walking in Middle-earth’, November 2023.
• Spot On, Doc Podcast, presenting ‘Tolkien and Jackson: Presentations of Ecological Apocalypse’,  November 2020.

Conference Papers 

• The Tolkien Society's Oxonmoot at the University of Oxford, co-presenting ‘Arda Marred and Climate Change: Ecological Anxiety and the End of the World’ with Journee Cotton, August 2024.
• The British Association for Romantic Studies International Conference Romantic Making and Unmaking at the University of Glasgow, presenting ‘“We’re in the same tale still!” Mapping British Romanticism’s legacies in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, July 2024.
• The Tolkien Society's Hybrid Seminar Tolkien’s Romantic Resonances in Leeds, presenting ‘“We’re in the same tale still!” Mapping British Romanticism’s legacies in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, July 2024.
• Leeds International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, presenting ‘“The king has got a crown again": Ruin as Hyperobject in Arda’, July 2024.
• The Keats Foundation's John Keats in 2024: Prospects and Retrospections, presenting ‘Destabilising Temporality in the Fairy Poems of Keats and Tolkien’, May 2024.
• The Mythopoeic Society's Online Something Mighty Queer: Online MidWinter Seminar, co-presenting ‘Tolkien’s Queer Landscape: Three Papers on Middle-earth’s Heterotopias’ with Mariana Rios Maldonado and Marita Arvaniti, February 2024.
• The Tolkien Society's Oxonmoot at the University of Oxford, presenting ‘An Introduction to The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien’, September 2023.
• The Tolkien Society's Oxonmoot at the University of Oxford, presenting ‘“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf – mountains”: Romantic Mountaineering in Middle-earth', August 2022.
• The British Association for Romantic Studies International Conference New Romanticisms, presenting ‘“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf – mountains”: Romantic Mountaineering in Middle-earth’, August 2022.
• Distance 2020 Online at the University of York and Melbourne, presenting ‘“Patch’d and Torn”: Transcribing History through the Fragmented Manuscript of ‘The Eve of St. Mark’’, August 2020.
• The Tolkien Society's Tolkien 2019 Conference, presenting ‘Rewriting the British Literary Tradition: Keatsian Echoes in The Book of Lost Tales and The Lord of the Rings’, August 2019.
• Leeds International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, presenting ‘The Medieval Faëry from Keats, through Morris to Tolkien’, July 2019.

Round Tables

• The Mythopoeic Society's MythCon 51, co-presenting ‘Race, Racisims, and Tolkien’ with Robin Reid and Craig Franson, August 2021.

English Literature

• ENGLIT1011: 1A, Poetry and Poetics

Comparative Literature

• COMPLIT1001: 1A, Heroes (Heroic Men)

Affiliations

• Member of BARS
• Member of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic
• Member of the University of Glasgow's C18/Romanticism Research Cluster
• Member of the University of Glasgow's Environmental Humanities Research Cluster

Organisational Committees

• Education Secretary of The Tolkien Society. I organise and run the Society's seminar series and the international Tolkien Reading Day.
• Editor-in-Chief of Mapping the Impossible: Journal of Fantasy Research
• Committee Member of Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Conference (GIFCon)