My recent work explores geometries of attention in modern and contemporary Anglophone fiction. I am particularly interested in the ways in which novelists’ modelling of different forms of attention redraws the ethical and epistemic contours of the novel. My doctoral thesis (Modernism, Empathy, and the Contemporary Novel), which I am currently preparing for publication, argued for a revivification of modernist forms of aesthetic attention in twenty-first-century British and Irish novels preoccupied with the problem of empathy. My next project theorizes the notion of the ‘new impersonal’ in the work of writers such as Rachel Cusk, Anna Burns, J. M. Coetzee, and others.
Broad research interests include visual culture, novel theory, attention studies, comparative literature, and literature and science.
I teach literary theory and the period papers from 1830 to the present; convene the HENG bridge paper on Women’s life writing: gender and social change in Britain, c. 1870-1930; and supervise undergraduates in areas related to my research expertise.
I have been selected in 2023 as an Ashmolean Faculty Research Fellow to undertake research on twentieth-century American prints. I have worked with the museum’s teaching curator to explore innovative approaches to object-centred learning.
In my capacity as a writing trainer at TORCH, I lead fortnightly Shut Up and Write sessions for doctoral students and ERCs.
