Personal Statement
I am Senior Lecturer in English Literature and co-director of the Centre for New and International Writing. My research areas include form and aesthetics in the contemporary novel, contemporary literary/theoretical depictions of the spectral, literature and cinema, and literature and popular music. I lead Illustrating Futures, a collaboration with Comics Youth and Tate, which addresses the use of comics and graphic novels in the treatment of mental health in young people. I am author of David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016) and editor of Consider David Foster Wallace (2010), and in 2013-14 I was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Centre for the purposes of researching Wallace's archive. I am currently working on a new book about haunting in contemporary theory and culture for Chicago University Press.

I also write fiction, and my debut novel Zealandia was shortlisted for the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize and the 2020 Northern Book Prize. My writing has appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Point, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, and I have been invited to speak about my research at institutions including New York University, RMIT Melbourne, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin, and on BBC News, Radio 3 and Radio 4. In 2024 I was Visiting Professor in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of Konstanz.

I would welcome proposals for doctoral supervision in the following areas: contemporary fiction and theory; haunting and ghosts (not Gothic studies); literature and the animal/nonhuman; literature and cinema; literature and visual art; literature and popular music.

My office hours in semester 1 2025-26 are Tuesdays at 1-2pm and 2-3pm. If you want to arrange a meeting please just email me or turn up on the day. If you want to arrange a meeting online during this time I'm happy to do so.