I gained my PhD in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Sheffield in 2014, and my thesis dealt with scribal behaviour and textual transmission in the Old English version of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum. Since then I have worked in teaching and research posts at the universities of Newcastle, Sheffield, Manchester and Erlangen-Nürnberg.
My work focuses on language variation and change in historical English, examining how ideas about language variation are reflected in the writing of individuals. I use historical sociolinguistic and philological methods to analyse material texts, and explore how language learning was transmitted, and how wider notions of linguistic norms or language standards impact on individual writers’ training and output. I work in manuscript studies, textual editing and digital humanities. Previous digital humanities projects I have contributed to include the Eighteenth Century English Phonology database at the University of Sheffield, and the Mary Hamilton Papers at the University of Manchester.
In my current project I am creating a digital edition of John of Garland's Dictionarius, a medieval text for teaching Latin to speakers of French and English. I am exploring questions about the way people interacted with the Dictionarius, and what the text can tell us about multilingualism and language teaching in the Middle Ages.