My work examines the links between literature and its wider intellectual history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am the author of The Good Life and Other Fictions (Princeton, 2027) – a study of the way literary fiction helps us to understand the broader role of fictiveness in our lives. I have also published widely on Orwell's political thinking (Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell's Political Ideals (OUP, 2018)) – and edited Animal Farm for Oxford World Classics in 2021. My articles on literary-philosophical questions have appeared in a wide variety of journals: New Literary History, ELH, Philosophy and Literature, Textual Practice and the Journal of Modern Literature. I have a strong interest in Irish writing, and have produced several essays on W. B. Yeats and Edmund Burke in particular. I am the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (2012) and the author of The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (2008). I am currently completing What is that Noise? – an account of literary theory via The Waste Land.
Recent Publications:
— 'What was an Emotion? T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell,' Modernism/Modernity, 33.1 (2026)
— 'Philosophy and the Novel: Iris Murdoch' in The British Novel of Ideas, ed. Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 322-338
—'Revolution and Counter-Revolution' in Oxford Handbook to W. B. Yeats, ed. Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell (Oxford University Press, 2023), 216-235
—'Unlucky Jim: Conrad, Chance, Ethics,' Journal of Modern Literature, 46.1 (2022): 1-17
—ed. George Orwell, Animal Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
—'Orwell and Humanism' in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Nathan Waddell (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64-78
—'The Prejudices of Enlightenment' in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, ed. Moyra Haslett (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 91-109
—'Important Nonsense: Yeats and Symbolism,' New Literary History, 50.2 (2019): 219-43
—Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (Oxford University Press, 2018)
