- 19th and 20th century literature, culture and intellectual history
- Anarchism, socialism and radical left literary cultures
- Philosophy, politics and aesthetics of realism
- Sociology of literature
My research interests centre on the novel, genre, and form, especially histories of aesthetic forms and the roles these play in broader histories of knowledge. My first book, Realism, Form and Representation (OUP, 2021), reconsiders literary realism via the legacy of its philosophical pre-history, to ask how -- or if -- we can conceptualise realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and which are thus irreducible to representation. How, in short, realism represents the unrepresentable, and poses metaphysical questions through an exploration of the here and now. The book explores a range of novels from the early twentieth century, from writers including Joseph Conrad, May Sinclair, H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford, to see how they grapple with the fiendish recalcitrance of "reality".
My next project traces the influence of anarchist intellectual traditions on fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the modes of transmission through which anarchist writings, libertarian and communitarian, influence both the forms that organise political experience and conceptualisations of the novel as a modeller of sociability, in order to probe larger questions about the intelligibility of extended collective belonging in the face of an increasingly abstract -- spatially diffuse, technologically mediated -- social world. It is tentatively entitled Anarchist Aesthetics: Radical Politics and the Modern Novel.
At St Hugh's, I teach Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature), Paper 3 (1830-1910), and Paper 4 (1910-Present Day). I also supervise undergraduate and MSt dissertations on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture.
