I have been writing and researching in the field of Victorian print culture for over forty years, and I have published widely on many aspects of this field. Mass circulation visual culture is my  current major area for research. My main academic interests include: 19th. Century popular and mass circulation literature, especially periodicals (I was an Associate Editor and major contributor for The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism); graphic images and prints, especially 19th. century wood engraving and lithography; the literature of Victorian urban investigation; and the work of John Ruskin.I would be interested in supervising post-graduate research in any of these areas.

Current research is built round two major projects - a monograph for Manchester University Press called 'Comedy, Caricature and the Social Order 1820-1850', which is now in the press, and the editorship of the Victorian volume of the 'Oxford History of Popular Print Culture'. But I have also been working on a number of smaller projects including a long essay on magazines of miscellaneous information in the 1820s,(Victorian Periodicals Review) and an account of the work of the caricaturist and illustrator Robert Seymour, which has recently appeared as an open-access web site under the NINES umbrella. Recently completed commissioned essays include an overview of ninenteenth century British graphic satire for the French scolarly journal 'Ridiculosa', a chapter on historical research using web based visual sources, and an essay on nineteenth century almanacks. Future commissioned work includes the entries on 'Popular Culture' and 'Illustration' for the Oxford Bibliography Online; an essay on comic verse in magazines in the 1820s and 1830s for Victorian Poetry; and a book chapter on early Victorian illustration.

As well as my post at Salford I was an Associate Professor at the Ruskin Programme at Lancaster University between 2002 and 2012, and I have recently completed editing (with Professor Keith Hanley) a volume of essays on Ruskin which derive from a collaborative AHRC project on Ruskin (Ashgate: forthcoming 2013). I am also a Visiting Professor at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University where I have taught an annual residential seminar for graduate students and faculty members since 2002. More recently (2010) I have become a Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Print Culture at the University of Ghent where I teach a range of graduate classes.

I am closely involved with the American based Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, serving both on the editorial board of Victorian Periodicals Review and as a member of the Society's executive. In September 2010 I gave the Society's Wolff Lecture at the annual conference at Yale on 'Caricature to Cartoon - The Comic Image and the Periodical Press 1820-1850'. I will chair the Conference Committee of the Society for the 2013 Annual Conference which will be held in Salford. I serve on the Editorial Board of both the Victorians Institute Journal and The Manchester Region History Review.

While largely retired from undergraduate teaching, I continue to contribute to a range of scholarly conferences and to teach and supervise post-graduate students Recent invited plenary lectures have included the 'On the Page' conference at Salford, a paper at the Oxford Internet Institute on research on visual culture using on-line resources, and a conference in Heidelberg on the influence of Punch. In 2010 I gave the Annual Lecture of the Ruskin Society in March, and since 2010 I have spoken at conferences on subjects as diverse as printed ephemera, almanacs, the illustration of Victorian periodicals, and inlaid patchwork. In 2011 I spoke at conferences in Lancastr (nineteenth century theatre) and Canterbury (nineteenth century illustrated comic periodicals), and formed one of the external contributors to a graduate programme on book history held at the University of Ghent in December. I gave a research seminar to the Centre for Intertextual and Editorial Research in Cardiff in December 2011, and a research seminar for art historians at Reading University in February 2012. I have been invited to speak at the Western Canadian Victorian Studies Association conference in Victoria, British Columbia in April 2012, and to give one of the plenary lectures at an international Dickens Conference in Greta Bridge in May.