I was awarded my PhD in English at the University of Southampton in 2018 for a thesis on the Hollywood science-fiction films of the 1980s. I taught English, Film, and Media Studies at the universities of East Anglia, Southampton, and Winchester over the next two years and then, in September 2020, began a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Expanding my doctoral research during this time, I published my first monograph, Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979-2017, with Liverpool University Press in March 2023. I continued at Warwick as a Teaching Fellow until September 2025, when I was appointed as an Early Career Development Fellow in the English department at King’s. 

Research interests

• Science fiction literature and cinema
• British and American popular culture
• The energy and environmental humanities
• Literary and cultural theory

My research specialisms include British and American science fiction, the energy and environmental humanities, and materialist aesthetic theory. My current monograph project, titled A Second Modernity: Energy, Infrastructure, and Utopia in British and American Culture, explores how British and American writers, filmmakers, architects, and engineers have imagined the future of energy and its infrastructures. The monograph is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in its ‘Post45’ book series. I am also in the early stages of planning my next research project, which will examine the role popular culture has played in helping British communities negotiate past and present energy transitions. In addition to my work on energy cultures, I am interested in some of the fundamental questions raised by materialist cultural theory, particularly how we might think about the relationship between aesthetic experience and capitalism’s underlying social forms.

Teaching

I teach on a range of modules in the English department, which cover subjects as diverse as the American short story, the literature of London, and film adaptations of early modern plays.

Selected publications

• A Second Modernity: Energy, Infrastructure, and Utopia in British and American Culture (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2027)
• Dystopia and Dispossession in the Hollywood Science-Fiction Film, 1979–2017: The Aesthetics of Enclosure (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023)
• ‘Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Visual Culture’, Critical Quarterly, 64.4 (2022), 117–37
• ‘Double Take: “Cognitive Estrangement” Reconsidered from the Perspective of Marx’s Value Theory’, Extrapolation, 63.3 (2022), 273–96
• ‘Commodity Horror: Videodrome and the Industrialisation of Canadian Culture’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 19.4 (2021), 420–38