Research Overview

I completed my PhD at Lancaster in 2020 in the Literature department, adopting a highly interdisciplinary approach, bridging literature, art history and cultural studies. I am the author of two monographs and co-editor of two essay collections. My first monograph, Authors and Art Movements of the Twentieth Century (Routledge 2022), is part of Routledge's 'studies in twentieth century literature' series and explores the ways in which various major writers were greatly influenced by very particular artists and art movements. My second monograph, The Art of Orality: Cultural Aesthetics in the Absence of Writing (Palgrave 2024), considers the impact of a culture being oral or literate (that is, bearing a purely spoken or a spoken and written form of language) on the styles and features of its visual art, arguing that many of the most profound developments in the art world are directly correlative with the cultural transition from orality to literacy. I am co-editor, alongside Warren Mortimer, of Digressions in Deep Time: Ecocritical Approaches to Literature and the Arts (Rowman and Littlefield/Bloomsbury), which was published as part of the 'Ecocritical Theory and Practice' series. This collection includes work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee. I am also co-editor, with Emil Tangham Hazelhurst, of the forthcoming collection Apocalyptic Ecolinguistics: Language, Landscape, and Ecoanxiety in the Age of Ecological Crisis. I have also written on related themes for various collections, journals and mass media publications including The Guardian and The Conversation.