Research Overview

I am Research Associate in English Literature on The Future of Human Reproduction Project. Prior to joining the project I was postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds.

My research interests are in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. My monograph Nineteenth-Century Legacies in Contemporary US Literature: A New American Renaissance is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Focusing on fiction, memoir and poetry by authors including John Keene, Marilynne Robinson, George Saunders and Maggie Nelson, this argues that contemporary writers turn to the works of this foundational period in American letters to harness its idealistic conception of the literary as a utopian mode that facilitates intersubjective communication and thus shapes social life.

I work accross different historical periods and am broadly interested in theories of embodiment and sensation, literary futurities, the impact of technological change on representation, and relationships between cinema and literature.