Biography
I hold a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford, where I worked across the English and Classics Departments on a dissertation addressing the questions What is a classic? and What is world literature? from the perspective of the Victorian autodidact-turned-publisher J. M. Dent, founder of Everyman’s Library. During my doctorate, I was awarded a Marjorie Bond Rare Book Collection Research Fellowship from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which enabled me to conduct three months of fieldwork in the J. M. Dent & Sons Records in 2022. Before Oxford, I trained in Classics and classical reception at University College London (BA) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil). I also write as a freelancer for literary magazines in English and Italian, with criticism appearing in outlets such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Artribune, Public Books, and Asymptote. My first book, provisionally titled The Century of Everyman: A History of Everyman’s Library, from its Founding to the Present, is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Research interests and PhD supervision
I welcome proposals on topics that intersect with my current research, particularly in the following areas:
- print cultures of the late 19th and 20th centuries
- world literature and translation studies
- modernism and the middlebrow
- classical reception studies
- the history and practice of literary criticism
I am broadly interested in notions of the ‘classic’ and canonicity, and in how these intersect with capitalism to shape access to culture and education across classes and national borders. I have written extensively on grassroots engagements with classical antiquity and the so-called Western canon and have published on this and similar topics in Classical Receptions Journal, Literary Imagination, and New American Studies Journal. My first monograph, based on my dissertation and under contract with Princeton University Press, offers a cultural history of Everyman’s Library from its foundation in 1906 by the working-class publisher J. M. Dent to the present. Drawing on archival work, it explores how this mass-market series made cultural hierarchies more permeable and how the category of ‘classic’ itself evolved in Britain, its colonial contexts, and beyond. I am also developing a second book project that investigates the infrastructures, reading practices, and transnational networks that enabled working-class access to—and reinterpretation of—a world literary canon, from the revolutions of 1848 to the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.
Teaching
My teaching expertise spans 19th- and 20th-century English literature, theories and methods of comparative literature, classical reception, and the history of the book. At King’s, I teach modules on the formation of literary canons and ideas of nationhood, the rise of the European novel, and 20th- and 21st-century mythmaking in the work of contemporary artists such as Kae Tempest and diaspora writers in African American and Caribbean contexts.
Expertise and public engagement
In addition to teaching and research, I write for public-facing literary magazines in English and Italian and have collaborated with cultural institutions in London including The Courtauld Institute of Art and Thames & Hudson. I am committed to work that bridges academia and wider public debates on the role of the humanities in challenging times. This is exemplified by my recent co-edited special issue of the New American Studies Journal, which explores canon formation in modern North America through contributions by established scholars and creative practitioners, from publishers to performance artists. A recording of the special issue launch is available online.
Selected publications
Academic
Literary criticism