I am currently exploring literary translation, its potential role in education, and its mediation and practices in children’s literature in the UK.

My earlier years of research were focused primarily on children’s literature: my doctoral thesis explored contemporary, politically committed children’s picturebooks. An expanded version was published as The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature (John Benjamins, 2015). This monograph proposes an existentialist theorisation of adult-child relationships in children’s literature.

During my postdoctoral work I studied perceptions of child precocity in the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at a variety of discourses surrounding precocity, from literary to academic texts. My aim was to situate narratives of child precocity, both within contemporary concerns regarding time and economic pressures on education, and in continuity with more traditional forms of storytelling related to ‘child time’ and ability. A number of publications, including three in history of education journals, were derived from this work.

I very much like working on different types of projects and have published on such varied topics as the Mozart Effect, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the ‘pushy parent’ label, Simone de Beauvoir... and the motif of the moon in Tintin.