I studied for my BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as well as spending a year in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University on a Herchel Smith Scholarship. Before joining Wadham, I was a Bye-Fellow, Director of Studies, and College Lecturer in English and Philosophy at Downing College, Cambridge. I have also undertaken pre-clinical training in child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, and will soon begin clinical training in adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy with the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy.
My work concerns the visual, material, and literary culture of the twentieth (and early twenty-first) century. I am currently in the process of publishing my doctoral research with Cambridge University Press as a short monograph titled On Fire: Combustion, Aesthetics, and the Global Environmental Crisis. This book will provide an international perspective on combustion as a particularly complex aesthetic figure for representing contemporary social and political experience. I have also begun work towards a project examining the representation of animal states of mind across psychoanalytic, literary, and philosophical contexts.
I have taught widely across the English Tripos and the Philosophy Tripos at Cambridge. At Wadham, I am responsible for teaching the following papers: Introduction to Literature; English Literature, 1760-1830; English Literature, 1830-1910; English Literature, 1910-Present; and dissertations. I am also a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, and an affiliate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge.
