- Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture
- Literary Studies
About me
I work on modernism, the role of publishing in literary culture, the experimental novel through the 20th century.
I was educated at the University of Warwick (BA (Hons) in English and American Literature 1987), Birkbeck College, London (MA in Gender, Culture and Society 1993), and the University of Westminster (PhD in English Literature 2000).
I am the Head of the Graduate School.
My present research interests include modernism, the contemporary small press, the publishing of women writers in the 1950s and 1960s.
Teaching
I have supervised 12 PhD students to completion, and I am currently supervising research on, among other things, esotericism in European literature, the small press, the short story. I would welcome applications from students wishing to pursue graduate research on aspects of late nineteenth-century and modernist literature and culture, on contemporary fiction, on the experimental novel, on women's writing, or on literary publishing.
Research
Over the last few years my work has concentrated on four main areas, modernism, occult and supernatural beliefs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, literary publishing, and contemporary fiction. My monograph, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (EUP, 2013; paperback 2015) brings together the first two in arguing that, for experimental artists in the early twentieth century, magic played a crucial role. I have also co-edited a two-volume Selected Works of Andrew Lang (with Alex Warwick and Andrew Teverson, 2015). The Selected Works has been shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award 2015. Lang was an important figure at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose work has since been neglected. My work on the Selected Works aims to show the significance of his attempt to use both scientific and supernatural models to understand a range of issues. At the same time, I have been developing my work on the contemporary novel through co-editing a series of four edited collections for Bloomsbury to be published through 2014 and 2015, The Decades Series. The volumes in the series are on each decade from the 1970s on, and situate the British novel in the specifics of it historical context at the same time as building up a picture of its most significant formal and generic developments over the period.
I have recently published articles on the novelist Anna Kavan and on the real, the fictional and the virtual in contemporary writing. My current research focuses on the small press and on the publishing of experimental writing by women in the 1950s and 1960s.
WIth Dr Georgina Colby, I run a project on the Contemporary Small Press which aims to investigate the conditions and possibilities of small press publishing in the UK, and to bring together small presses, writers and readers. See www.contemporarysmallpress.com.
Publications
For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.