My teaching and research take place primarily on the English Literature programme at York St John University, where I specialise in eighteenth-century literature. My research explores the role played by cheap print in mediating the relationship between citizens and the state during the long eighteenth century, with a particular interest in propaganda, protest and satire. I am also interested in the intersection between Gothic, Romantic and Sentimental cultures during the long eighteen century.
I am the Course Lead for English Literature, Chair of the School of Humanities Community of Practice for Employability and Co-Director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire (YRUSOS). I am a Senior Fellow of the HEA, an SFHEA mentor and I sit on the York St John Teaching Senate.
Beyond York St John University, I sit on the Executive Council of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) and the BSECS Publication and Communications sub-committees. I am Chief Reviews Editor for the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Section Co-Editor for the Literature Compass Journal. I am also a series editor for People of Print (Cambridge University Press) and Spectres, Horrors and Hauntings (Bloomsbury). I co-host the ongoing monthly podcast 'Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire' and produce the official BSECS podcast, 'Coffeehouse Perspectives.'
I am an External Examiner for the English Literature degree at Liverpool University and have assessed work externally for the University of Ghent..
I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2014. Prior to working at York St John University, I was a Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield, where I also an AHRC Postdoctoral project titled “Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry” and served as an Honorary Research Fellow for the Centre for Archival Practices. I was also a co-lead Educator on the University of Sheffield/Futurelearn Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Literature of the English Country House between 2014 and 2016. I joined the English Literature team at York St John University full time in 2016.
I teach widely across the English Literature programme, but tend to deal predominantly with pre-1900 Literature.
On our BA in English Literature I teach:
- Theorizing Literature: Power and Identity
- Dawn of Print (Module Director)
- The Romantic Imagination: Excess, Affect and Revolution (Module Director)
- Literature at Work
- Literary Legacies: The Gothic (Module Director)
- Research Now: Literature and Satire (Module Director)
I also contribute lectures to:
- Forms of Narrative
- Introduction to Literary Studies 1 and 2
- Writing, Research and Literature
- Sick Stories
- Science Fiction for Survival
Outside of Literature I contribute sessions to:
- Politics and... (Politics)
- York in Flux (Foundation Year in Liberal Arts)
- Media Evolution and History (Film and Media)
- Working With Words (Creative Writing)
- Publishing Then and Now (Creative Writing MA)
On the MA in Contemporary Literature I teach:
- Historicizing the Contemporary (Module Director)
- Form and Genre Now
I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on a range of topics which, in recent years, have included the form and function of the eighteenth-century elegy, representations of the devil from Paradise Lost to the present, virtue and politeness in Gulliver's Travels, the role of women writers in the eighteenth-century public sphere, Female quixotic narratives, satirical responses to Samuel Richardson's sentimental literature and the treatment of memory and consciousness in Romantic poetry.
My research explores the role of cheap print in negotiating the relationship between citizen and state in the long eighteenth century, with a particular interest works of propaganda, protest and satire. My doctoral research focused on Whig-sponsored periodicals, particularly those written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, which neglected to signal explicitly their partisan allegiance. Following my PhD I began to work on radical literature produced by the Hartshead Press in Sheffield at the end of the eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the output of Joseph Gales and James Montgomery. In recent years my attention has turned to satire, especially in the eighteenth century, and I have published work on such figures as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood and Virginia Woolf (as well as forthcoming pieces on satire in the works of Charles Ignatius Sancho and the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour, A Tale). I have also worked on satire in the context of animals, hatred, cannibalism and folk horror.
As a founding member of the 'People of Print Collective' I am also interested in challenging historic understanding of regionality and agency in the context of early modern and eighteenth-century print culture and book history, as explored in the Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Era (Palgrave, 2022) and the People of Print Cambridge University Press series which I co-edit with Drs Rachel Stenner and Kaley Kramer.
Working with Rob Edgar and the YSJ Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group, I have also begun exploring the viability of 'folk horror' as a means of analyzing eighteenth-century writing which straddles the boundaries between what we ordinarily recognize as either gothic, sentimental or Romantic literature. Alongside Dawn Keetley (Lehigh University), Rob and I also edit the Spectres, Horrors and Hauntings book series at Bloomsbury,
I welcome PhD proposals in any area of long eighteenth-century literature and culture, but especially the following:
- Early print culture (pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers)
- Non-fiction prose (travel writing, life-writing, essays)
- Political writing and satire
- Whig literary culture
- The writing of Joseph Addison and/or Richard Steele
- Eighteenth-century women's writing and satire (e.g., Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Jane Collier)
- The rise of the novel
- Representations of politeness
- Representations of the coffee house
- Representations of readers and reading in the eighteenth century
- The relationship between the Gothic, sentimentalism and or
- Romanticism
- Folk Horror
- Twenty-first-century engagements with eighteenth-century literary culture
Recent publications
On the Literature programme I am Course Lead for English Literature.
Beyond our programme I am Chair of the School of Humanities Community of Practice for Employability and Co-Director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire (YRUSOS) and Deputy Chair of the YSJ Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group. In 2019 to 2021, I also provided the Impact case study for Literature in REF 2021.
I am a Senior Fellow of the HEA, an SFHEA mentor, and I sit on the York St John University Teaching Senate.
Beyond York St John University I am a member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Executive Council and sit on the Publications and Communications Sub-Committees. I am also Chief Reviews Editor for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and prior to this served as the Chief Editor of Criticks, the online reviews hub for BSECS (2020-2025).
I am the Eighteenth-Century Section Editor for The Literature Compass Journal.
I also sit on the advisory board of the international Diversifying Print History: Archives, Museums, Narratives Network.
I have co-organised 2 conferences in recent years:
- Satire: Deaths, Births, Legacies at York St John University in 2018, co-organized with Jo Waugh.
- People of Print: Printers, Stationers and Booksellers at Sheffield Hallam University in 2019, co-organized with Kaley Kramer and Rachel Stenner).
I have been an editor on:
- Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Era, ed. by Rachel Stenner, Kaley Kramer and Adam J Smith (Palgrave, 2022).
- Impolite Periodicals, ed. by Emrys D. Jones and Katarina Stenke (Bucknell University Press, 2025).
I am also a series editor on the People of Print series of "Elements" at Cambridge University of Press, the first two of which were:
- People of Print: Seventeenth-Century England (2023)
- People of Print: Eighteenth-Century England (2025)
Together with my colleague Jo Waugh I have also, since 2019, co-hosted the monthly podcast Smith and Waugh Talk About Satire.
