Biography
My research focuses 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.
My second monograph, Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television, was published in 2019 by Palgrave. I am co-editor (with Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo and Sheri-Marie Harrison) of Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. My new monograph, Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism, is complete and will be published by Edinburgh University Press in early 2024. I have published scholarly articles in Journal of American Studies, Parallax, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 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. A new essay, co-authored with Sheri-Marie Harrison is forthcoming in a special issue of Orbit on Percival Everett. Other recent essays of mine appear in the Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (2019), The City in American Literature and Culture (CUP 2021), and The Routledge Companion to Modern Literature and Music (2021)
I also have written book reviews and literary journalism for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the LA Review of books and The Independent.
I am co-Deputy Editor of C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-First-Century Writings.