About
I am Senior Lecturer in English Literature and co-director of the Centre for New and International Writing. My research areas include form and aesthetics in the contemporary novel, contemporary literary/theoretical depictions of the spectral, literature and cinema, and literature and popular music. I lead Illustrating Futures, a collaboration with Comics Youth and Tate, which addresses the use of comics and graphic novels in the treatment of mental health in young people. I am author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016) and editor of Consider David Foster Wallace (2010), and in 2013-14 I was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre for the purposes of researching Wallace's archive. I am currently working on a new book about haunting in contemporary theory and culture for Cambridge University Press.
I also write fiction, and my debut novel Zealandia was shortlisted for the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and the 2020 Northern Book Prize. My writing has appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Point, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and I have been invited to speak about my research at institutions including New York University, RMIT Melbourne, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. In 2024 I will be Visiting Professor in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of Konstanz.
I would welcome proposals for doctoral supervision in the following areas: contemporary fiction and theory; affect theory, haunting and ghosts (not Gothic studies); literature and the animal/nonhuman; literature and cinema; literature and visual art; literature and popular music.
My office hours in semester 1 2024-25 are Mondays at 3pm (on Teams) and Tuesdays at 12pm (in person). If you want to arrange a meeting please just email me (Teams hour) or turn up on the day (in person hour).
Prizes or Honours
- Shortlisted, Northern Book Prize 2020 (& Other Stories Press/The Big Issue, 2020)
- Shortlisted, 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019)
- School of the Arts Research Development and Impact Fund Award for 'Illustrating Futures' collaboration (University of Liverpool, 2017)
- Santander Travel Grant (Santander, 2017)
- Knowledge Exchange Voucher, Illustrating Futures collaboration (University of Liverpool, 2017)
- School of the Arts Research Development Initiative Fund Award (University of Liverpool, 2012)
- British Association of American Studies Research Travel Grant (British Association of American Studies, 2011)
- Shortlisted, BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers 2019 (AHRC/BBC, 2018)
- KEI Voucher (2016)
- RDIF Award for Illustrating Futures (2016)
Funded Fellowships
- Visiting Scholarship, Center for Cultural Studies Research, University of Konstanz (University of Konstanz, 2024)
- 2013-14 Harry Ransom Centre Research Fellowship in the Humanities (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) (University of Texas at Austin, 2013)