English, Media and Creative Arts

My research interests lie in modernist and mid-twentieth-century literature, more specifically forms of transnational and cross-cultural displacement, mobile material culture, narrative form, modern women's writing, and, more recently, literary engagements with biopolitics and with the concepts of hospitality, empathy and care. 

My first monograph was published in July 2017 by Edinburgh University Press, Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light. It considers the impact of a new culture of portability upon modernist visions of and approaches to fiction, spanning from the late nineteenth century to World War II. A central aim is to account for and explore modernist conceptions of literary form in mobile rather than static terms, as a counterpoint to literary architectural visions.

More recently, I have become interested in fraught literary representations of hospitality and empathy in late modernist and postwar writing, particularly the ways in which such troubled depictions invoke and reflect upon acts of political diplomacy, immigration, welfare and the reception of refugees across the continent of Europe around the Second World War. My next book-length project illuminates and examines a double-edged discourse surrounding emotional expression that emerged in British women's writing of the mid-century period, with a view to the wider practices and histories of emotion management. 

Articles based on aspects of my research have been published in journals such as Modernist Cultures (2021), Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2019), Papers on Language and Literature (2019), Literature Compass (2016), Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing (2015), Modernism/Modernity (2014), Textual Practice (2013), and Katherine Mansfield Studies (2013). I am co-editor (with Dr. Jeffrey Clapp) of a volume of essays entitled Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge 2016). I also recently co-edited (with Dr Alexandra Peat) a double special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on 'Discourses of Emotional Labour' (2023).

I was a founding member of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA) and I am currently a Co-Editor for the 'Modernist Geographies' section of Literature Compass.

For more information on my monograph: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-portable-modernisms.html
For more information on the volume I co-edited: 

I welcome expressions of interest from potential postgraduate students in any aspect of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction.