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, College Lecturer in English and Philosophy, and Director of Studies in 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 am soon due to begin clinical training in adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy with the Cambridge Society for Psychotherapy.
My work concerns the visual, material, and literary cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, particularly in relation to ecology. My doctoral research considered combustion as a complex aesthetic figure for representing contemporary social and political experience—with a focus on literary expressions of global environmental crisis—while my current work examines how the nature and meaning of ‘the nation’ has been shaped by imaginative encounters with deep time.
This research forms part of a broader intellectual project which questions whether the development and trajectory of the modern nation-state (and specifically England) displays any philosophically salient structure, meaning, or purpose. Although my work typically considers how modern anglophone literature struggles to believe that it does, I am also interested in what a convincing answer to this question would look like. As such, I hope to publish a series of five studies at roughly five-year intervals, beginning with Britain Before England: Deep Time and Post-War Literature. As its title suggests, Britain Before England will examine how writers have handled the prospective contradiction of collecting events and landscapes which radically pre-date the political formation of a nation-state into its narrative and identity (whether as a means of celebration or critique), particularly within the context of post-war nation-building efforts.
At Wadham, I am responsible for teaching the following papers: Prelims Paper 1B, Introduction to Literature; Prelims Paper 3, English Literature 1830-1910; Prelims Paper 4, English Literature 1910-Present; and FHS Paper 5, English Literature 1760-1830. I am also an Ashmolean Museum Junior Teaching Fellow, and an affiliate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
