Research

I am a scholar of Victorian, 20th-century British, and Global Anglophone literature, with special interest in literary theory, empire, and critical university studies.

My research examines the relationships between institutions of Anglophone literary education and literary criticism across British and Global Anglophone contexts, from the late nineteenth century to the present. My current book project, Public Disinterest: Criticism and Literary Education, traces a counter-history of Anglophone literary criticism through situating its methods and practices within movements for adult public education—from Victorian experiments in universal access to university education to the anticolonial reading tactics of cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

My wider research interests include histories of the left, the role of the intellectual in public life, postcolonial and anticolonial approaches to reading, and the relationship between creative and critical practice.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Reading Against Feeling: The Structure of Feeling, Practical Criticism, and Stuart Hall’s Migrant Study.” Cultural Critique. Issue 125, Fall 2024, pp. 34-65.

“Revolutionizing Criticism: Collage as Feminist Critical Practice in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.” Feminist Modernist Studies. Volume 6, Issue 1, 2023, pp. 62-66.

Conference Panels Organized

“After Caliban: Literary Education, Empire, and the ‘Global Anglophone.’” American Comparative Literature Association, Spring 2025, online.

Conference Papers Presented

“Theorizing through Likeness in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin.” Modernist Studies Association, 7-10 Nov. 2024, Chicago.

“‘University Education for the Whole Nation’: The University Extension Movement and the Modern Literary Classroom.” American Comparative Literature Association, 14-17 Mar. 2024, Montréal.

“Disinterested States: Democracy and Close Reading.” Roundtable on “Better State Forms.” Modern Languages Association, 5-8 Jan. 2023, San Francisco.

“Negative Democracy: Disinterestedness from Kant to Close Reading.” Modern Languages Association, 5-8 Jan. 2023, San Francisco.

“Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Anticolonial Migrant Study.” Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, 13-25 May 2022, Montréal.

“The Democracy of Richard G. Moulton’s ‘Inductive Criticism.’” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies, 24-27 Mar. 2022, Salt Lake City.

“Thinking with Stuart Hall: Inhabiting the Crisis.” American Comparative Literature Association, 8-11 Apr. 2021, online.

“Keyword: Criticism” and “Global Victorian Studies.” Form Across Literature and the Sciences in Victorian Britain, 22-24 May 2019, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France.