My teaching and research take place across the English Literature and Politics programmes at York St John University, where my specialisms fall into two broad areas: postwar and contemporary culture, and political theory. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Exeter and my MA from the University of York. I completed my PhD at the University of York in 2011 and taught there until Autumn 2013 when I took up my position at York St John University. I completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in 2015 and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
My teaching on the undergraduate degree in English Literature focuses on twentieth and twenty-first-century literature and theory. I am responsible for the political philosophy strand of the undergraduate degree in Politics, which encompasses the study of modern political ideologies and the broader history of political thought. I also coordinate and teach across York St John's MA in Contemporary Literature, and contribute to our MA programmes in International Politics and Security, and Environment, Society and Justice.
Courses I teach on:
- BA English Literature
- BA Creative Writing and English Literature
- BA English Literature and Film Studies
- BA English Literature and History
- BA Media and English Literature
- BA English Literature and Religion
- BA Politics
- BA Politics and International Relations
- BA Politics and History
- BA Politics, Philosophy and Economics
- MA Contemporary Literature
- MA Publishing and Contemporary Literature
- MA International Politics and Security
- MA Environment, Society and Justice
Canonicity; Introduction to Literary Studies; Literary Theory; Cultures of the Now; Research Now; Gender and Sexualities; Political Philosophy: Themes and Thinkers; Political Ideologies; Political Analysis; Global Justice; Theorising the Contemporary; Historicising the Contemporary; World, Globe, Literature; Speculative Bodies; Emerging Issues in International Relations; Environment, Society and Justice; Environmental Humanities; Political Ecology.
My research is principally organised around the intersection of politics and spatiality in British cultural production of the period 1945 to the present. I have particular interests in literary and geographical theories of space, democratic political theory and the post-Marxist tradition of critical theory.
My monograph Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) examines representations of urban space across a range of fiction published in the wake of Thatcherism in order to evaluate the political legacy of British cultural studies in the field of literary production. I co-edited the first collection of critical work on the British writer Sarah Hall (Gylphi, 2023) and have co-edited and published material in special issues of Literary Geographies, C21 Literature and the Open Library of Humanities.
My work has appeared in Contemporary Literature and the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, as well as edited collections on the cultural politics of Thatcherism, the novelist Maggie Gee, the politics of integrity, the inter-discipline of literary geography and as part of Cambridge UP’s ‘British Literature in Transition’ series. I am currently working on two book projects: the first is an edited collection with University of Wales Press on literary geographies of isolation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic; the second is a study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of the architect in British fiction.
I welcome PhD proposals in any area of postwar and contemporary culture, critical theory, twentieth- and twenty-first-century political theory and literary geography. I am currently supervising the following PhD projects:
- Kristine Brence, ‘East Coast of the Baltic Sea: Politics, Identity and Musicology in Rock Music. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 1990s to 2010s’
- Clara Juncker, ‘Patterns in Contemporary Bestsellers’
- Joseph Owen Wright, ‘Plastic and Plasticity in the Contemporary Novel: Persons, Landscapes and Objects in the Apocalypse’
Recent publications
I act as an external examiner at King's College London and co-edit the open-access journal Literary Geographies.
