Research Overview

His first book, Conrad, Language, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002), received the Joseph Conrad Society of America's Adam Gillon Award for the most significant work in Conrad studies from 2001-4. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory (Palgrave, 2006) is a study of the reception and representation of theoretical ideas in literary fiction since the 1960s. Sleep and the Novel (Palgrave, 2018) examines representations of the sleeping body in fiction since 1800. An A-Z of Jane Austen (Bloomsbury, 2022) provides an exploratory guide to themes, places, tropes and concepts in the work of the great novelist, from A is for Accident to Z is for Zigzag. Technosleep: Fictions, Frontiers, Futures (Palgrave, 2023), co-authored with Catherine Coveney, Eric Hsu, Rob Meadows and Simon Williams, considers the fate of "natural" slumber in the modern world. His current research is on manhunt narratives in nineteenth-century British fiction.

Current Teaching

English 203: Victorian Literature

English 331: Jane Austen

English 456: Manhunt Narratives

PhD Supervision Interests

I am interested in supervising projects on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British fiction, especially Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad.