Thesis title: The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel
Supervisor: Professor Peter Boxall
Research interests: modern and contemporary literature; the novel; temporality; futurity; problems of contemporaneity; allusion, intertextuality and citation; autofiction; film; critical theory.
Teaching: I am currently supervising undergraduate dissertations on late-twentieth century Gothic fiction and New Journalism, and I am a graduate teaching assistant for Paper 6: Film Criticism. I open to teaching and supervisory opportunities across a range of papers, including Literature in English 1830-1910, and 1910–present day.
Doctoral Research: My research focuses on the Anglophone novel's response to problems of futurity in the twenty-first century. I identify literary allusion as an old technique used by a range of contemporary novelists in an innovative way. In this mode, allusion to other texts can re-situate us in textual traditions with which we have lost meaningful contact, and thus grant us a language of shared intertexts, with which we might articulate our speculations, predictions and dreams of the future. I call such allusion ‘vatic’, or prophetic, a term repurposed from poetry criticism. My doctoral thesis tracks permutations of the vatic across a transatlantic range of novelists, including Claire-Louise Bennett, Ben Lerner, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and Ali Smith.
Conference Papers:
‘Turn, Turn, Turn?: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Figuring the Future in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas’, Modern and Contemporary Literature Graduate Forum, University of Oxford (1/5/24)
‘“an unwinding of America”: Pastiche, Counterfactual and Narrative Pedagogy in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad’, International Society for the Study of Narrative (Narrative 2024), University of Newcastle (19/4/24)
‘“Not the Outside Past”: The Fugitive Time of Literature in Claire Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19’, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP 14), University of Washington, Seattle, WA (7/10/23)
‘The Vatic Mode: An Introduction’, Media, Arts and Humanities Graduate Seminar, University of Sussex (31/10/22)
‘“What if I made you /Hear this with your hands?”: A Hauntological Reading of Ben Lerner’s 10:04’, Graduate Symposium for American Literature, University of Cambridge (7/5/22)