I arrived at Queen Mary in September 2012, having previously taught English and Creative Writing for 8 years at Anglia Ruskin University. Before that I was a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College Cambridge, having completed my PhD in 2001 at King’s College Cambridge where I researched the literary uses of physics in the 1920s. I received an MA English Literature from the University of Sheffield in 1998 and a BA Combined Studies from the University of Manchester in 1996. My pronouns are they / them.
Teaching
ESH124: Poetry
ESH126: London Global
ESH275: Queering Utopia
ESH6061: Teaching Trans Lives
ESH7022: Literature, Science & Technology
Research
Research Interests:
Science and technology in culture
Popular culture and mass media 1900-1940
The poetry of William Empson
J. B. Priestley
J. W. Dunne
Parapsychology and psychical research
Dreams
Wireless culture
Recent and On-Going Research:
My first book, Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (Chicago, 2012) explores the uses of Einstein’s theories of relativity in literary and popular culture in Britain during the 1920s and 30s.
I have a moustache, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has featured in performances of Edwardian technology and Victorian telepathy statistics.
I am currently writing a book about prophetic dreams from the 1880s to the present, focusing on the evolving relationship between mass media, dreams and whiteness in the harvesting and narration of dreams that come true. This project is returning me to an interest in Social Anthropology which comprised a third of my BA Combined Studies.
'Empson's Einstein: science and modern reading', Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, ed Steven Meyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
‘Gender and the Domestication of Wireless Technology in 1920s Pulp Fiction’, in Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science eds Donald L. Opitz, Staffan Bergwik and Brigitte van Tiggelen (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 129-150.
‘Science and Technology’, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry, eds David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald (Chichester: John Wiley, 2014), pp. 69-80
‘Artifacts in Performance’, in Material Culture and Electronic Sound, ed. F. Weium and T. Boon (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013), pp. 45-68
‘William Empson, Ants and Aliens’, in Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, ed. J. R. Holmes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 116-29
Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe (London: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
‘"On the Back of the Light Waves": Novel Possibilities in the Fourth Dimension’, in Literature and Science, ed. S. Ruston (D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 91-110
‘Monogamy and the Next Step? William Empson and the Future of Love in Einstein’s Universe’, in Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 242-263
‘Interdisciplinarity and Public Engagement’, in In(ter)Discipline: New Languages for Criticism, eds. Gillian Beer, Malcolm Bowie, Beate Perrey. (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), pp. 211-220
‘Peter Robinson, what are you trying to prove?’, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson, eds. Katy Price and Adam Piette (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), pp. 219-232
