I studied for my BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees (in English) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and spent a year in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University on a Herchel Smith scholarship. Before joining Wadham, I was a Bye-Fellow, Director of Studies, and College Lecturer in English and Philosophy at Downing College, Cambridge. I have also undertaken pre-clinical training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
I work on modern and contemporary literature, often as a way of opening up perspectives on questions which usually belong to philosophers and historians. I am currently in the process of publishing a series of essays based on my doctoral research, which identified combustion as an especially complex aesthetic figure for representing twenty-first-century social and political experience, with a focus on contemporary British poetry.
At Wadham, I am responsible for teaching the following papers: Introduction to Literature; English Literature, 1760-1830; English Literature, 1830-1910; English Literature, 1910-Present; and dissertations. I have previously taught widely across the English Tripos and the Philosophy Tripos at Cambridge, and I’m currently a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, where I help to run a series of object-centred seminars as part of the cross-disciplinary Krasis programme.
