Biography
I joined Edinburgh Napier as Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in August 2015. I was Programme Leader for BA(Hons) English from 2017-22.
My primary research interests are in the early twentieth century, particularly literature about the First World War.
My monograph Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914-30 (Manchester University Press, 2014) argues that disenchantment was not only a post facto response to the war, and conceives it more widely as a condition of modernity. I have written a number of chapters and articles on related authors including Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, and C. E. Montague. I edited special issues of Modernist Cultures on ‘Modernism and the First World War’ (12.1, 2017), the Journal of War and Culture Studies (11.3, 2018), and a Print+ cluster for Modernism/modernity (7.2, 2022).
My current project in this area (funded so far by ENU and the Carnegie Trust) assesses the extent and scope of the War Books Boom of the late 1920s. An initial article has been published in First World War Studies (2022), and I am working towards a monograph on the subject.
My current secondary interest is in rural modernity and rural modernism; I am more generally interested in the spaces and places of literature. A 2023 article, theoretical but focusing on the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson, offers the first definition of ‘rural modernism’. Further work is forthcoming on this topic, the next article of which will examine wartime rural modernisms, bringing together the main intellectual strands of my work.
The other main strand of my work is in modernist textual editing. I edited H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The War in the Air (Wordsworth, 2017). I have been invited to edit volumes in the Complete Works editions of Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and May Sinclair.
Beyond these, I am interested in ideas about lateness, both in the sense of late modernism, and also Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘late style’. I am working on a survey article, and a piece examining David Bowie’s late style.
I serve on the executive steering committee for the British Association for Modernist Studies (Chair 2022), edit the New Canterbury Literary Society (Richard Aldington) Newsletter, and was previously Secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society (2011-19).