Faculty Member, English, Creative Writing and American Studies
Senior Lecturer
About
As a researcher I am interested in the material contexts for the formation of particular ideas, and I try to show how literary texts express ideas in ways that resonate with their wider social articulation. My work in the area of postcolonial studies has sought to link specific texts to the material structures of power that govern their production and to think about how far these texts work within and against the dominant narratives of public discourse.
I completed my DPhil at the University of Sussex in 2000. This work was on the cultural context for the Scottish Renaissance Movement of the inter-war years and it sought to ask why a nationalist reading of Scotland gained especial purchase during the years between 1918 and 1939. This work developed my interest in nations and nationalism, especially with modernist and postcolonial ideas of the nation, and in the material origins of cultural texts.
My current research is with the question of globalization and how this idea is represented in creative texts, especially contemporary fiction. I am particularly interested in questions of labour. I am working on a book-length study which seeks to think about how contemporary labour patterns have altered the character of work. How have the structures and nature of work been altered by its internationalization? What kinds of work are becoming prominent and how does this alter our understanding of the relationship between the individual worker, the state and money? What implications does this have for our understanding of the way that fiction can represent our working lives and the role of labour in the economic life of the societies that we live in?
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