I studied for my BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and spent a year at Harvard University on a Herchel Smith scholarship. Before joining Wadham, I was a Director of Studies and College Lecturer in English and Philosophy at Downing College, Cambridge.
I work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and society. My research explores how natural and ecological orders are both organised by social systems and conceptualised within intellectual and artistic cultures. My doctoral thesis identified combustion as a particularly complex aesthetic figure for representing nascent forms of historical experience—with a focus on contemporary British poetry—and I am currently in the process of publishing a series of essays based on this work, including an ‘Element’ for Cambridge University Press. Titled On Fire: Combustion and Aesthetics, this short monograph will provide an international perspective on the affordances of combustion for examining the recent history and politics of global environmental crisis.
I have also begun work towards a project exploring the relationship between post-war writing and natural history, with an emphasis on nation-(re)building efforts in Britain.
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 am 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.
