Welcome! I am a researcher and writer based in Edinburgh.
My work explores how literature can help us imagine, understand and rethink environmental history, planetary change and resource use. I’m also interested in the relationship between humans and other animals, especially animals we raise for food.
I am Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh. My first monograph, The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes was published in 2022. You can read more about it here. A sequel of sorts, an edited collection entitled Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene, has just been published.
My current research project examines how British writers developed new narrative strategies to tell the story of oil, its ascendancy and its transformative effects, from the early 1900s to the present moment. Entitled Narrating Oil, the project brings to light how writers were drawn to specific prose forms and genres (travelogues, novels, dramas and memoirs) at crucial moments in the history of oil, drawing on reinvention and innovation as a means to interrogate its ecological, social and political consequences. In doing so, the project demonstrates the importance of narrative and storytelling in the context of fossil fuels, extractivism and energy security, both historically and in our present moment of energy transition. You can find out more about that project here.
I also work as a freelance writer and reviewer - you can read more about that here.