Research Interests: Literary and aesthetic value; histories of criticism; cultural theory; African cinema; modernism; law and literature; theories of interpretation; and world literature.
My recent work focuses on Nigerian cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, I consider how the shift from celluloid to digital filmmaking impacted on conceptions of aesthetic value, as well as the institutional emergence of Nollywood – now the second-biggest film industry globally. I am also (and separately) writing on differing conceptions of ‘interpretation’ in literature and law.
Doctoral Thesis Title: 'Moments of Evaluation: Literature, the University and Value (1965-2015)'
Supervisor: Professor Ankhi Mukherjee
Doctoral Research: 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.
Teaching: I teach twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism at Lincoln and Keble colleges.