English, Media and Creative Arts

I work primarily in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture, with special interest in transnational and transcultural aspects of modernism, material culture, and artistic practices of collaboration and craft.

My first monograph, Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys, was published by Routledge in 2011, and explores the complex motivations for and figurations of modern travel, particularly in the context of colonial legacies. My second monograph (co-authored with Professor Melba Cuddy-Keane and Dr Adam Hammond) is entitled Modernism: Keywords (Wiley Blackwell 2014). Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association annual book prize for edition, anthology, or collection, Modernism: Keywords traces the character and thought of the modern era through its most salient debates, spotlighting the words at the heart of modernism.

I am now working on two book-length projects that expand my interest in travelling cultures. The first considers the popular culture of empire exhibitions between the two world wars and its legacies. Discussing a range of writers, artists, and poets including, Vahni Capildeo, E. M. Forster, Claude McKay, Louis MacNiece, Andrea Levy, and Virginia Woolf, this project brings to light a wealth of previously little-studied cultural ephemera and elucidates exhibition culture's influence on the production of modern and contemporary literature. The second project turns to literary representations of migration through a focus on ephemera, such as postcards, diaries, craft objects, photographs and letters. I am investigating how ephemera (real and fictional) appear in modern and contemporary literature and influence aesthetic form in relation to three migratory moments: the interwar European refugee crisis (1918-1945), the post-war so-called Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom (1945-1960) and the ongoing displacement of people from North Africa and the Middle East (2011 to present). 

My research has been published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies (2020), Women: A Cultural Review (2023/21), The Open Library of the Humanities Journal (2020), Literature & History (2019), and Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (2015). With Dr Claire Battershill, I co-edited a special issue of Literature & History on the topic of 'Modernism and Collaboration' (2019). I am also co-editor (with Dr Alison Vogelaar and Dr Brack Hale) of an edited volume entitled Discourses of Environmental Collapse: Imagining the End (Routledge 2018). I recently co-edited (with my colleague at Galway, Dr Emily Ridge ) a double special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on 'Discourses of Emotional Labour' (2023).