Research Overview

My main areas of interest are in literature and the Bible and literature and place. My work in both fields focuses on aesthetics in terms of both visual and sensuous experience of the world (aisthesis) and in political philosophy. My most recent monograph, The Politics of Purim reads Esther and its festival, Purim, via political and aesthetic theory. I have also recently co-edited a book on attitudes to human-world relations in the long nineteenth century: Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790-1930. My next projects continue this interest in aisthesis in literature (Rough Justice: The Politics of Working-Class Aesthetics in the Victorian Novel) and literary reception of the Bible.