I received my BA in English from Oxford University in 1999. After leaving college, I worked as a journalist and freelance researcher in London for two years. In 2002, I received my Master's from Queen Mary, University of London, having written a thesis on politics and rhetoric in Edmund Burke.

My dissertation, "Machines, Mechanism, and the Making of the English Novel," explores the way the rise of machines and mechanical philosophy drove formal innovation in eighteenth-century narrative fiction.