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 profoundly 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, have written for the media, organised events for festivals, and appeared on podcasts. A selection of highlights can be seen below:
Featured News
My book, The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times (Bloomsbury, 2020), is now available in paperback. You can find it in bookshops like WHSmith, Amazon, Blackwell’s, and Barnes & Noble.
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.
Watch the recording of my public lecture at Newcastle’s Lit&Phil, “Are We in a Sleep Crisis? Perspectives from Contemporary Culture”. The talk explores representations of sleep in contemporary culture and the so-called sleep crisis, namely the idea that contemporary society is sleep-deprived.
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.
Read my article in The Conversation celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and discussing the legacies of this novel in the 21st century. The article has since been republished in several news outlets, including Salon.