Matthew Sperling is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Reading. Before this, he taught at the University of Oxford, having studied there, at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and at Gravesend Grammar School. He has had works of poetry, fiction, and criticism published; his critical works include the essay collection Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts (co-edited with Piers Pennington, 2011), and essays on poets Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne, on the index as a critical tool, and on modern book history. His current research is concerned with recent poetry and the history of publishing. He was born in Kent in 1982, and lives in London.