Jo teaches modules which introduce approaches to literature and research, narratives of disease and contagion, and Victorian literature. Her main interest is in Victorian literature, and is especially interested in the representation of disease, contagion, and infection in novels of the period. She completed her Phd, 'Talking About the Weather: Climate and the Victorian Novel' at the University of York in 2008, which explored the ways in which literary weather intersects with Victorian debates about evolution, industry and medicine, as well as ideas about prophecy and prediction and their relationships to meteorological science. She is also interested in the intersections between scientific and literary writing of the period more broadly. She focuses particularly on the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Jo also has an interest in Animal Studies in the Victorian period, and has recently written on popular understanding of the rabies virus and its intersection with social and political contexts of the 1840s.