About Me
I am an Early Career Research Fellow at University College London, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My project, which contains significant Digital Humanities elements and falls within quantitative palaeography, aims to shed light on the understudied question of why medieval scribes used abbreviation when they copied manuscripts. Specifically, I approach this question through digital and statistical analyses of manuscript text, extracted using AI-based handwritten text recognition and encoded within TEI-XML.
Prior to joining UCL, I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in January 2025. Part of my thesis laid the foundations for my current project, while elsewhere I conducted digital textual analysis on the work of a fourteenth-century French poet, Jean de Saint-Quentin. In doing so, I interrogated the validity of existing claims regarding which texts can be attributed to Jean, while also considering possible new additions to his body of work. A monograph building on this portion of the thesis is already under contract.
Between my DPhil and the start of my fellowship, I worked as a research assistant on a digital project led by Dr Matthew Holford at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. I was responsible for the majority of the data modelling and coding for the project, which sought to extract user-friendly tabular data from the Bodleian’s TEI-XML manuscript catalogues using Python and XPath. The outputs of the project are already being used to support quantitative codicological research, and have resulted in significant recent discoveries about Oxford’s manuscript archives, which will be published in due course.
Teaching
SELCS-CMII, University College London (October 2025 – Present):
My current UCL contract is majority research, but since arriving in October 2025 I have contributed to teaching within and beyond my host department. In this time, I have:
- Taught modules MDVL0021 and MDVL0024 in their entirety (both MA-level Old/Middle French language skills for historians) across Term 1, with revision sessions in Term 2 and exams in Term 3. In both cases I developed my own material to align with the students’ research interests.
- Taught a session within ELCS0075 (BA-level module entitled ‘Song in Society’), in which I covered a selection of medieval songs, and marked the subsequent relevant student submissions.
- Taught a session within MDVL0006 (MA-level History module on palaeography and codicology) on the use of Digital Humanities methods within manuscript studies.
- Supervised and marked undergraduate student dissertations on topics related to medieval French.
- Organised and led fortnightly PhD seminars (entitled ‘Medieval and Modern Exchanges’) for current PhD students within SELCS-CMII and others, focussing on skills relevant for early-career researchers including presentation skills, article preparation, and job/grant applications.
- Given an invited talk at the SELCS-CMII general PhD seminar on my career trajectory so far.
- Participated in administering French oral exams, for all three examined years of the BA program.
University of Oxford (January 2022 – September 2025):
In my time at the University of Oxford, I held college lectureships at Hertford, Merton, and St Peter’s Colleges, and I also taught for the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Within these roles, I:
- Taught Prelims (UG year 1) papers II (French translation), III (short French texts), and IV (French narrative fiction) in their entirety, in both class and tutorial settings.
- Taught FHS (UG years 2 and 4) papers I (Essay in French), IIA (French translation), and IX (Medieval French Special Authors) in their entirety, and parts of VI (Medieval French Literature) and VIII (Modern French Literature), in both class and tutorial settings.
- Devised and delivered lectures including ‘The Digital Humanities: What, why, and how?’.
- Devised and delivered seminars on literary theories and methods, including digital textual analysis.
- Devised and delivered a session on XPath for students on the MSc in Digital Scholarship.
- Facilitated admissions interviews for applicants to undergraduate Modern Languages programmes.
Independent / Volunteer Roles:
In addition to my work in these roles, I have:
- Devised and delivered introductory sessions teaching TEI-XML and XPath as a means of encoding and extracting textual data. I have taught versions of this course as part of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, (August 2024 and 2025, due to be repeated in 2026), at a guest lecture at Louisiana State University in April 2026, and within a series of online workshops organised in May 2026 by the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee. I will do so again in July 2026 as part of the Digital Medieval Studies Institute in Leeds.
- Gained over 4,000 hours’ experience teaching French language and literature online and on a one-to-one basis, particularly with A-Level students.
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