I am an English DPhil student at St John’s college, where I hold a faculty studentship. In my current research, I am exploring the relationship between extinction and anthropocentrism in apocalyptic literary texts from British and American periodicals of the first half of the nineteenth century. One key aim of my thesis is to consider whether the status accorded to non-human animals in these texts varies across national lines in this period. As texts about apocalypse are often highly allusive, I also hope to trace the more general lines of domestic and transatlantic influence between them. My BA and MA dissertations, both awarded at the University of Exeter, focused on eighteenth-century animal poetry and the role of silence in gothic texts respectively. Before I began my DPhil, I taught secondary-school English and gained my PGCE with QTS.
