I'm a professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. I work principally on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with frequent forays into later periods. My thinking about this period usually gets drawn back, in one way or another, to close and sustained encounters with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’ve tended to work at the intersection between literature and contiguous fields – philosophy, theology, science, visual arts – and have longstanding interests in critical theory. I am a 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.