My research explores the interactions between travel writing and British literature in the long eighteenth century, focusing on narratives of China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.

I've published widely on topics including: Victorian ideas of the Pacific, the reception of British Romanticism in Asia, "globe-trotter" travellers in Meiji Japan, the Macartney Embassy to China, and the Robinson Crusoe trilogy.

I will be on sabbatical in 2025-26, writing a book on connections between the Utopian narrative and the travel account, focusing on British writing on Japan. 

Books and Special Issues

• (as editor) Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Narratives and English Literature, 1780–1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) (co-edited with Tomoe Kumojima)

• (as editor) British Romanticism in Asia: The Reception, Translation, and Transformation of Romantic Literature in India and East Asia (Palgrave Macmillan) (co-edited with Alex Watson)
• (as editor) Isabella Bird, Victorian Women’s Travel Writing, and Japan, special issue of Studies in Travel Writing 21.1 (co-edited with Steve Clark)

Chapters and Journal Articles

• (forthcoming) “Hermit Kingdoms: British Ideas of Japan and Tibet, 1760–1860”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of British Romanticism and Asia, ed. Peter Kitson, Rosinka Chaudhuri and Alex Watson. (Bloomsbury)
• (forthcoming) “Melancholic Insects: Lafcadio Hearn, Translation, and the Romantic Mediation of Japan”, in European Minor Literatures and Transnational Romanticism, ed. Brecht de Groote and Rhys Kaminski-Jones (Edinburgh University Press)
• “An Aesthetic Gateway to Japan: Mount Fuji and the Steamship Arrival in British Travel Writing, 1880–1900”, in Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Narratives and Anglophone Literature, 1780–1914 (Palgrave, 2024), 57–84
• “Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Anglophone Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century”, in Pacific Gateways: Trans-Oceanic Narratives and English Literature (Palgrave, 2024), 1–23
• “Orientalising the British Class System: Exploring the ‘Chinese’ Landscapes of Sir William Chambers, 1740–1775”, in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, edited by Ve-Yin Tee (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 34–59
• “Religious Conversion and the Far East in the Crusoe Trilogy”, in Robinson Crusoe in Asia, edited by Steve Clark and Yukari Yoshihara (Palgrave, 2021), 109–135
• “Satire Across a ‘Sea of Islands’: Japan and the Pacific in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels”, in Pacific Insularity: Imaginary Geography of Insular Spaces in the Pacific, eds. Michael Heitkemper-Yates and Thomas Schwarz (Tokyo: Rikkyo University Press, 2021), 41–56
• “Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Tour Thro’ The Whole Island of Great Britain”, in Handbook of British Travel Writing, ed. Barbara Schaff (De Gruyter, 2020), 161–180
• "Western Representations of Mount Fuji in the Nineteenth Century”, in Bungakuteki Fuji-san Gaido [Literary Guide to Mount Fuji], ed. Megumi Kato (Showado Press, 2020), 23–26
• “The Manchu Invasion of Britain: Nomadic Resonances in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Chinoiserie Aesthetics, and Material Culture”, in Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England: Receptions and Transformations from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period, eds. Claire Gallien and Ladan Niayesh (Palgrave, 2019), 115–35
• “British Romanticism in Asia: Reception, Translation, Transformation”, in The Reception of British Romanticism in Asia: Modernity, Tradition, and Nationhood (co-written with Alex Watson) (Palgrave, 2019), 1–35
• “‘Like the Ladies of Europe’? Female Emancipation and the ‘Scale of Civilization’ in Victorian Women’s Writing on Japan, 1840–80”, Studies in Travel Writing 21.1 (2017), 17–32
• “Isabella Bird, Victorian Globalism, and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880)”, Studies in Travel Writing 21.1 (2017) (co-written with Steve Clark), 1–16
• “Jonathan Swift and Kaempfer’s History of Japan: The Origins of the Court and Empire of Japan (1727/8)”, Notes and Queries 63.1 (March 2016), 79–82
•  “Revising the Contact Zone: William Adams, Reception History, and the Opening of Japan, 1600 – 1860”, in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 297–312
• “Navigating the Paths of Eastern Romance: The Arabian Nights in Eighteenth-Century English Descriptions of Constantinople”, in Eighteenth-Century Cultural Intermediaries, Lumières internationales series, eds. Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding and Ellen R. Welch (Honoré Champion, 2015), 277–94
• “Anglo-Chinese Caresses: Civility, Friendship, and Trade in English Representations of China, 1760–1800”, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.2 (June 2015), 277–96
• “The Edo Period in English Literature? Japanese Isolationism in the Work of John Locke and Jonathan Swift”, Tohoku Romantic Studies 1, 1–18
• “British Government under the Qianlong Emperor’s Gaze: Satire, Imperialism, and the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792 – 1797”, Lumen: Journal of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 85–107
• “Plagiarism and the Macartney Embassy to China (1792–1794): The Manuscript of Stephen Else”, Notes and Queries 59.3 (September 2012), 342–5