My research focuses on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel, and I am particularly interested in the questions of form, affect, and experiment. I work on literature in English and Spanish, as well as translated from Japanese.
My first book project, tentatively titled ‘Criticism in the Middle: Readerly Affect and Experimental Form’, confronts experimental novels from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries which resist affective legibility. That is, they do not straightforwardly produce delight or disgust, sympathy or alienation, but indulge, instead, an affective middle, cultivating readerly feelings such as indifference, weariness or hesitance. Reading novels by Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Max Porter and Ali Smith, I attend to the way in which experimental formal devices design these feelings, making a case for affect projected by the intricacies and contradictions of such forms, as well as by their broader literary histories and specific geneses in writers’ drafts.
My next project, with the working title ‘Magical Realist Feeling’ will map the affective potency of magical realist literature in English, Spanish, and in translation, turning to feeling as a way to resolve the definitional difficulty that has agonised the genre since the early twentieth century.
From March 2025, as part of a Short-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Tokyo, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, I will work on a project entitled ‘Mieko Kanai and Mild Feeling’, which will juxtapose that Japanese writer’s depiction of domestic inertia with other Anglophone texts similarly preoccupied.
I am also the Research Assistant on Joe Moshenska’s ‘Creating Criticism’ project, which is supported by the John Fell Fund. The project seeks to create an international network of scholars engaged in work which blurs and reconfigures the boundaries between creative and critical writing, interrogating the possibilities, challenges, and institutional configurations of that work. More details can be found here: https://creatingcriticism.web.ox.ac.uk/.
I teach Prelims Paper 3 (Literature in English, 1830-1910) and Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English, 1910-Present). I have experiencing supervising dissertations on a range of modern and contemporary themes, and have delivered workshops, seminars and tutorials as part of Balliol College’s outreach programmes.
