Staff Profiles

The primary focus of my research is on poetic form, its construction and its destabilization, mainly within colonial contexts. By 'form' I mean a type or category of literary work or genre. My work concentrates on a number of particular genres - the novel, the autobiography, the biography, the essay - and on how elements of each can be incorporated into a single text in a way that can unsettle conventional and ideological commonplaces about genre. I examine modern and contemporary prose written in France and in former French colonies. I have published in leading peer-reviewed international journals, including Paragraph, French Forum, Romance Studies, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Expressions Maghrébines. 

I am currently, if slowly, working on a monograph titled Algerian Allegories. Aesthetics, Anticolonialism and the Future of Past Revolutions for the University of Virginia Press). I'm looking forward to two forthcoming publications, the first, with Carlos Garrido Castellano is the edited volume The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics, as part of Routledge Special Issues as Books (SPIBs) (London: Routledge, 2025)  and the second, with Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir, is a special issue of Memory Studies Review, titled `Slow Memory: The Transformative Promptings of Literature in Post-conflict Societies¿ (2026).

My earlier work focused on genre in the work of the contemporary French writer Pierre Michon and the main focus of my research in this area was the delineation of the ways in which Michon incorporates ideas of genre developed by the French avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The book's reception in France has been positive and resulted in an invitation to present at the international colloquium on Pierre Michon held in Cérisy in 2009.

The interdisciplinary nature of my research, and its contribution to literary theory, is reflected in the publication of a co-edited collection Formless: Ways in an out of Form (with my colleague Paul Hegarty).  My work on genre within colonial contexts has led to Postcolonial Poetics: Form and Genre, a collection of essays co-edited with Jane Hiddleston and published by Liverpool University Press in 2011. Within the context of colonial studies my article published in French Forum (2004) on genre and on pragmatic approaches to theories of genre led to two commissioned pieces for publications that will serve as key reference points for students of postcolonial studies namely, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (2008) and Postcolonial Thought in the Francophone World (2009).

In addition my work has appeared in international journals devoted to colonialism and poetics. My article, 'Images of Algeria', which appeared in a special issue of Expressions Maghrébines led to an invitation to address a conference on cinematic forms of cultural memory held in Sétif, Algeria. Similarly, my article on Edouard Glissant's poetics of opacity was accepted for a special issue of Romance Studies entitled `The Literary Territories of Postcolonialism' and led to an invitation to present at the Sorbonne on the topic of politics and postcolonialism in 2008.  Extending the analysis of colonial critique, I have recently co-edited a collection of essays on Travel Writing in the Mediteranean (Oxford, Legenda, 2011) with Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross.

I have been asked to act as referee for journals such Modern and Contemporary France, French Studies and Studies in Travel Writing.
 

I hugely enjoy teaching and I try to be good at what I do. I bring my research into the classroom and my teaching style is informed by experience (I learned my craft teaching in a community school) and by academic qualifications: Higher Diploma in Education (1987, NUI) and the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2018, UCC). I have maintained a keen interest in new developments and approaches. My approach has also been informed by on-going critical reflection on teaching and research and by listening to feedback from my students. I currently offer a module on the Ends of Empire focusing on cultural representations of the memory of the Algerian War of Independence.