I joined King’s in 2017 after six years teaching at Colgate University, a liberal arts college in upstate New York. I earned my BA in English at the University of Cambridge, and my MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research interests and PhD supervision

I am a scholar of modernism and the mid-twentieth century, of Left literary history and of modern cultural and intellectual history more generally. My main research concerns the novel, its circulation and critical reception, with a particular interest in how modernism and realism came to name competing aesthetic ideologies and spheres of influence in the hot wars of the 1930s and 1940s and in the Cold War thereafter.

My first book, Mid-Century Romance: Modernism, Socialist Culture and the Historical Novel (OUP, 2024), is a revisionary history of the historical novel from Romanticism to the present. Its central chapters detail a revival of the form in the literary cultures of British Late Modernism and international communism. It tells the story of how a form, then and since thought dead to the world, was brought back to life, how it fought fascism in Europe and colonialism abroad to lay the groundwork for two of the most influential critical and creative projects of the late twentieth century: magical realism and so-called ‘history from below.’ I am researching a new project on the literary and artistic realisms of the twentieth-century British Left.

I welcome PhD proposals in any aspect of twentieth-century Left literary culture, social movement literature, historical fiction, the history and geopolitics of the modern novel. For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I convene or have taught on the following modules: Literature & Social Movements, Realism & its Others in the Long Twentieth Century, Text Culture Theory: London and Urban Modernity, Post-1945, Mind of the Novel, Reading Poetry, Language in Time, Language on the Edge, A Book.