I am a Modern Languages graduate, with a Masters in European Literature and a PhD in surrealism. I am a founding member of the Comparative Literature programme at King’s and part of the team behind the pioneering Global Iberias curriculum in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. I co-direct the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking with Dr Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela. I have over 25 years’ experience as an educator working across primary, secondary and higher education in the UK and EU.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• international surrealism
• modern and contemporary avant-garde women artists and writers
• projects relating to the activities of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking
• travel writing
• word and image studies

I research international surrealism and have published most notably on Leonora Carrington, surrealist magazines, and film. My work sits at the intersections of disciplines, genres, languages and media, and includes the digital humanities. I gave the 2025 David Vilaseca Lecture on Salvador Dalí. I am currently a collaborator on a Spanish government-funded research project into international women travellers to Spain. I have supervised doctoral candidates researching a wide range of topics in Comparative Literature, French Studies and Hispanism, including practice-based approaches. Projects have included modern and postmodern comics and magazine cultures in Spain, Central and South America; English, Portuguese and Spanish modernism; international surrealism and the historical avant-gardes; intermedial studies including the plastic arts, painting and photography; and theatre practice.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I have taught across four departments and programmes and over twenty undergraduate and postgraduate modules. I have designed curricula, developed and convened modules, and led on academic literacies and innovative pedagogy, including interdisciplinary approaches to cultural objects. I teach my research specialisms in classes on comparative literary and visual cultures, Iberian global histories, European modernism and avant-gardes, and travel writing.

Expertise and public engagement

I was co-curator of the Arts Council England-funded Play and Psychoanalysis exhibition at the Freud Museum London in 2017. I have co-directed creative workshops for refugee organisations. I work with Dr Angela Maddock, textile artist, investigating the interplay between textile practice and Anna Freud’s child psychoanalysis, and with Phil Davis of Write Inspired on promoting creative writing practices in the primary classroom. As part of my work with the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking, I support educators, secondary school teachers and their pupils studying languages at key stages 3, 4, and 5.

Selected publications

• (2023) ‘Travel writing, authenticity and artifice in Luís Buñuel’s Tierra sin pan and Fermín Solís’s Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas’, pp. 107-124, in Here and Beyond: Narratives of Travel and Mobility in Contemporary Iberian Culture, eds. H Buffery, S Mainer, D Miranda-Barreiro, M Veiga, Lit Verlag, Berlin.
• (2019) ‘Creativity and Women’s Time in the Work of Leonora Carrington’, pp. 155-174, in Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies, eds. A Cox, J Hewison, M Man, and R Shannon, Vernon Press, Wilmington, Delaware.
• (2017) ‘In Two Places at the Same Time: Archiving the Domestic in the Work of Leonora Carrington and Sally Mann’, pp. 101-129, in Domestic Imaginaries: Navigating the Home in Global Literary and Visual Cultures, eds. B Harper and H Price, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature, Cham
• (2017) ‘‘Are we to be contented with dreams?’ Getting older in the work of Leonora Carrington’, pp. 291-307, Journal of Romance Studies, 17.3.
• (2010) ‘Love in the margins: women, the family, and domestic space in literary reviews from France and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s’, pp. 173-189, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 16.2/3.