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My interests cluster around variation and change in English--whether linguistic or literary.  Thus in the past I have worked on ways of establishing textual homogeneity / heterogeneity in Old English prose  (word order in the auxiliary verb, lexical variation etc). More recently, I have been working on an unattributed sixteenth-century manuscript translation and map in the British Library of the OE "Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan" which may be the work of  John Dee. Some of the clues to its translator may be embedded in the text; others have to do with the provenance of the OE source manuscript. I also continue to pursue my longtime interest in consonantal variation and change, out of which came my article on "Sliding in English Dialects" --as in the alternation between "fill-horse" and 'thill-horse' in Shakespeare, or between '(plum)-duff' and 'dough.' Currently I am collecting data on final devoicing (as in 'anythink' for 'anything') as evidence of a phenomenon which has persisted from OE  but not been recognized as such.

My recent biographical study, T. F. Powys: Aspects of a Life, also reflects my focus on variation and change and draws extensively on archival materials. In the book I consider the impact on Powys's mature style of his early attempts at biblical commentary. In addition, I include a chapter on the help he received from "the mysterious Mrs Stracey" whose annotations on his many early manuscripts in the HRHRC are listed as "by an unknown hand."

I have now turned my attention to two loosely related projects--a book to be entitled "Fighting Words: Boxing in English and American Literature"  and a historical dictionary of boxing terminology which will include obsolescent terms from the Regency period or earlier ('fibbing' = punching) as well as standard terms ('jab' and 'feint') and relatively recent innovations such as Floyd Patterson's 'peekaboo' style (1960) and Muhammad Ali's 'rope-a-dope' tactics (1975).