I joined York St John University in August 2019 as a Lecturer in American Studies and History. I am also the MA Coordinator for American Studies. I previously worked as a lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University for almost a decade.
My teaching and research background fall within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. My undergraduate and postgraduate degrees are all in American Studies. My PhD examined the impact of war trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder upon American post-World War I crime fiction, with a specific focus upon the British-American writer Raymond Chandler. I conducted my doctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and with the Department for History and Heritage at the Canadian Archives in Ottawa, Canada.
I am a US-UK Commission Fulbright Awardee, which I completed at New York University in 2010.
Module director:
- AMS4006M Introduction to American Studies
- AMS5002M From Slavery to Freedom
- AMS5003M Nation Divided: America in the Era of the Civil War
- AMS6011M Special Study in American Culture: US Crime Culture
Contributor:
- WAR6003M The American Way of War
My interdisciplinary research is grounded in field of American Studies and lies at the intersection of culture, history, politics, and social memory. My work focuses on the impact of war in 19th and 20th century America, with a secondary concentration on subversive culture. My monograph, War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard Boiled Detective as Veteran (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), challenges the US canon and argues a case for the work of crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler to be located alongside the great work of the American Lost Generation. By taking into account the impact of wartime post-traumatic stress disorder upon American crime fiction I introduced the original concept of ‘War Noir’ to the study of American literature. My research has featured in a number of journals, including Comparative American Studies and the European Journal of American Culture. I have also contributed book chapters to two edited collections, Men After War (Routledge, 2013) and Time and the City in Literary Imagination (Palgrave, 2021).
I regularly contribute short articles for the American crime fiction magazine ‘The Strand’ in order to reach a wider non-academic audience. In November 2017 I was commissioned by Andrew Gulli, the Managing Editor of The Strand, to write the Afterword to accompany a previously unpublished short story by Raymond Chandler of the magazine (issue 53, 2017). As a result of this, numerous media outlets in the US called attention to my research. Demonstrating its wide-ranging impact, my work was mentioned in, among other online and print mediums, the Associated Press, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Australian, and the Smithsonian Magazine.
I currently have 2 key strands of research. Firstly, I am expanding upon my original notion of ‘War Noir’ to continue the themes introduced in my first book by examining the work of key 20th century war veteran writers in the field of US crime fiction. For this, I have drawn upon the writers James Crumely and Charles Willeford in particular, but will also be examining other 20th century writers of crime fiction, including Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and Walter Mosley.
Secondly, along with my colleague Dr Anne-Marie Evans, we are in the process of putting together an edited collection titled Beyond the White House: The First Lady in American Film, Fiction, and Culture. The volume aims to examine cultural representations of America's First Lady and brings together scholars from across the world including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and India. This is the first volume of its kind to consider the cultural representation of the First Lady through the prism of popular culture - and therefore consider her impact upon ‘cultural politics’ - and the first to regard her as a strategically important socio-cultural figure. For this collection I will be contributing a chapter on rape trauma in ABC's drama Scandal (2012 to 2018).
