Biography
My primary area of research is on the literary and cultural response to terrorism and crisis. I believe that through analysis of the ways texts represent, resist and/or reinforce the official narratives of “events” or moments of rupture, it is possible to move beyond often limited and reductive understandings of such phenomena. My research probes the extents to which we can understand instances of terror and crisis as symptoms of neoliberalism, structural inequality and uneven world-systems. Additionally, I am increasingly interested in the way literature depicts the intersection of traumatic ruptures with long-established patterns of state violence, systemic prejudice and other forms of slow violence. Finally, I have been developing significant new strands of work on the interplay between forms and genres, focusing particularly on 'literary television' and music and literature.
I have written three monographs and co-edited two collections of essays. Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024, and Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (co-edited with Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo and Sheri-Marie Harrison) was also published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Narratives of Hurricane Katrina: Literature, Film, and Television was published by Palgrave in 2019. I have published scholarly articles in Journal of American Studies, Parallax, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Orbit, Modern Language Review, Comparative American Studies, European Journal of American Culture, Canadian Review of American Studies, Reconstruction and Punk and Post Punk. I am co-editor (with Samuel Thomas) of a cluster of essays on ‘new literary television’ published by Post45 Contemporaries, to which I also contributed. Other recent essays of mine appear in the Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2019), The City in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and The Routledge Companion to Modern Literature and Music (2021)
I also regularly review contemporary fiction and have written book reviews and literary journalism for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Literary Review, the LA Review of books and The Independent.
I am co-Deputy Editor of C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-First-Century Writings.