Welcome! I am an academic and writer based in Edinburgh.

As Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh, I teach and write about twentieth-century literature, exploring how innovations in literary style and form have been used to reimagine what it means to be human. My research looks to bring to light how how literature can help us imagine, understand and rethink environmental history, planetary change and resource use. I’m also interested in how literature can make us think and act differently in our relationship with other animals, especially animals we raise for food. As part of my job, I am one of the lead judges for the James Tait Black Prize.

My first book, 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, was published in 2024.

I have a number of current research projects. I am writing a book about Virginia Woolf and extractivist ecologies, examining how her fiction and non-fiction stages critical encounters with various kinds of resources (fossil fuels, food, and animals, to name but three). It aims to show how Woolf’s modernist style was influenced by a shift in the relationship between Britain and its resources, while also suggesting how we might learn from her ideas today. I am also working on a project that explores how British writers developed new narrative strategies to tell the story of oil, its ascendancy, and its transformative effects, in the first half of the twentieth century. As part of this project, I have run Crude Representations, a symposium and seminar series on the cultural history of BP with Dr Malcolm Cook at the University of Southampton.

In addition, I am nearing completion of my first novel, Burnt, an eco-gothic tale of a coastal community haunted by the oil rigs mothballed on its shores.

When I have time, I enjoy taking on freelance writing and reviewing opportunities. You can read more about that here.