Most of my work concerns how aesthetic concepts are used to describe social change.
I have recently written on Ousmane Sembène’s use of fetishism as means for overthrowing political corruption in postcolonial Senegal, and on the literary implications of Gillian Rose’s idea of the “broken middle.” My current project looks at the rapid emergence of Nollywood – now the second-largest film industry in the world – in the early 1990s, and the global implications of the evaluative concepts that came of its development. Separately, I am writing on differing conceptions of ‘interpretation’ in literature and law.
Focusing on the period between 1975 and 2015, my doctoral work explored the idea of ‘literary value’, drawing on public disputes over evaluation at the universities of Cambridge, Stanford, Cape Town and the London Consortium. In broad terms, I chart a chronological move from objectivist to relativist theories of value; a subsequent shift to an aporetic middle-ground; and the final re-emergence of a loosely objectivist position. I also consider the biographical and institutional position of critics – such as John Guillory, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Colin MacCabe, Xolela Mangcu, Frank Kermode and Ankhi Mukherjee – who have engaged with questions of literary value.
General interests: literary and aesthetic value; African literature and film; histories of criticism; materialist thought; law and literature; modernist prose; and cultural theory.
I teach nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism at Lincoln and New colleges, and African Literature for the African Studies Centre. I am particularly open to supervising dissertations that focus on cultural theory, law and literature, and African literature or film.
Before returning to English, I worked on displacement in the context of natural disasters for the United Nations' Nansen Initiative, and as a legal researcher for South Africa's Constitutional Court. My subsequent legal work focused on administrative, refugee and constitutional law.
