I research and write about contemporary culture, crises, and the politics of time. I’m particularly interested in fiction, non-fiction, film, TV, and digital culture responding to twenty-first-century anxieties and crises that range from climate breakdown and other apocalyptic threats for my first book to the sleep crisis for my second book project. My work considers the understandings of time that shape these crises and our sense of self. I’m currently a Wellcome Trust funded Research Fellow at Northumbria University (UK).
My first book, The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times, is out with Bloomsbury. In this book, I offer a critical model for our cultural obsession with ‘the end’ by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel.
I’m now working on my second book project, “Writing the Sleep Crisis”, funded by the Wellcome Trust (Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science) and the European Commission (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship). In this project, I explore representations of sleep in contemporary culture and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, the idea that contemporary society is chronically sleep-deprived.
My criticism, essays and reviews have appeared in venues like Salon, RTÉ, boundary 2 online, ASAP/J, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Open Library of Humanities, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writing, edited collections published by Palgrave and Cambridge University Press, and elsewhere. I’m a public speaker, write for the media, organise events for festivals, and appear on podcasts. A selection of highlights can be seen below:
News
On 29th July, I’ll be speaking on applying for Wellcome Trust funding and my postdoc experience at Academic opportunities after the PhD: postdocs, fellowships & more. Registration is free.
On 7th July 2021, I’ll be giving a paper at the online interdisciplinary workshop Making Sleep: New Insights for a New Public Health? Registration is free.
In June 2021 I gave an online public lecture at Newcastle’s Lit&Phil, titled “Are We in a Sleep Crisis? Perspectives from Contemporary Culture”. The talk explored representations of sleep in contemporary culture and the so-called sleep crisis, namely the idea that contemporary society is chronically sleep-deprived. You can watch the recording of the event here.
In April 2021, with Andrew Tate and Mary McCampbell, I organised the first international conference devoted to Canadian writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland. You can find out more, including recorded sessions, on the conference website.
I was part of Image Journal‘s writers panel ‘God After God: Coupland, McLuhan, and Divine Absence in the Digital Age’. You can watch my pre-recorded remarks here, and catch up with the live conversation featuring myself, Nick Ripatrazone, Meghan O’Gieblyn, and Lisa Cockrel here.
For the 30th anniversary of the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, I wrote an article in The Conversation about the legacies of this novel in the 21st century. The article has since been republished in several news outlets, including Salon.
For RTÉ Brainstorm, I wrote an opinion piece on Christopher Nolan’s latest movie Tenet. The article argues that Tenet is a movie shaped by climate change that fails to appropriately confront the crisis.