Biography
I joined Edinburgh Napier as Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in August 2015. I am currently Programme Leader for BA(Hons) English.
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 a special issue of Modernist Cultures on ‘Modernism and the First World War’ (12.1, 2017), which I introduced, and of The Journal of War and Culture Studies (11.3, 2018), which I introduced with my co-editor and also contributed a sole-authored article. My current project in this area aims to assess the extent and scope of the supposed War Books Boom of the late 1920s. A funded research assistant, Dr James Benstead (Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant) is helping me work on this; Dr Fiona Houston (ENU funded) and Louise Bell (Carnegie Trust), have also worked on this.
Other work has mostly come in related areas. My research on ideas about disenchantment led to an article on Aldington's poetry and 'the masses' (Modernist Cultures 9.2, 2014); this also precipitated an interest in the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno, particularly his work on ‘late style’. A future book will probe this concept. I edited H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and The War in the Air (Wordsworth, 2017), and will edit May Sinclair’s Anne Severn and the Fieldings (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
Outside of these core interests, I have written about mapping and cartographic metaphors in Mapping Across Academia (Springer, 2017), and am currently working on two articles about the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson, one connecting him with recent theories of rural modernity, and one on the idea of 'wartime'.
I serve on the executive steering committee for the British Association for Modernist Studies (Vice-Chair 2021; Chair 2022), edit the New Canterbury Literary Society (Richard Aldington) Newsletter, and was previously Secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society (2011-19).