I’m a Research Fellow at Northumbria University (UK). I write about contemporary literature and culture. I’m particularly interested in North American and British writings 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 research considers the understandings of time underlying these crises and, more broadly, how articulations of time are integral to support or critique power structures.
My first book, The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times, is out with Bloomsbury. You can read the book’s introduction here. You can find out more about my other published projects here.
My new research project, “Writing the Sleep Crisis: 24/7 Capitalism and Neoliberal Subjectivity”, has recently attracted funding from the Wellcome Trust (Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Science) and the European Commission (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship). You can find out more about this project here.
My essays and reviews have appeared in journals and magazines like Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Open Library of Humanities, boundary 2 online, ASAP/J, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writing, Altre Modernità, Ransom Center Magazine, and edited collections published by Palgrave and Cambridge University Press.
News:
For The Polyphony, I wrote a short piece introducing my new research project, ‘Writing the Sleep Crisis’, and looking back on the project’s inaugural event ‘Forty Winks Café’ at the Being Human Festival 2020. The piece discusses sleep deprivation and speculative fiction that imagines the future end of sleep.
Andrew Tate, Mary McCampbell and I put together a Thinking With multimedia cluster for ASAP/J, titled ‘Thirty Years of Generation X’. The cluster comprises five short essays, a painting, and a video roundtable. My essay is titled ‘McJobs and Veal Fattening Pens: Work and Futurity in Generation X‘.
For Being Human Festival 2020, I organised Forty Winks Café, an online event on health, sleep, and contemporary culture, featuring talks by Katy Shaw, Jason Ellis and myself. You can watch the recording of the event here and download a list of recommended books, films, and videos featuring sleep here.
I wrote an entry on the iPhone in Ling Ma’s post-apocalyptic novel Severance for the ‘Crossed Lines‘ online exhibition of literary telephones curated by Sarah Jackson.
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