Research
My first monograph was Samuel Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche (Palgrave, 2006), and I published between 2005 and 2012 on Samuel Beckett and stylistics, Romanticism, and translation, as well as working on other modern and contemporary writers in the fields of contemporary theatre and Irish and French modernism.
Current research
In 2012 I was Principal Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Exploratory Award, 'Beckett and Brain Science'. The website for the project can be found here. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/currentprojects/beckettandthebrain/
One outcome of this project was a special issue (edited with Prof Ulrika Maude and Prof Laura Salisbury) of the Journal of Medical Humanities on Beckett and Medicine:
https://link.springer.com/journal/10912/37/2/page/1
Another was a series of workshops for the British National Health Service (NHS), run by Prof Jonathan Heron (IATL, Warwick) and documented here:
http://mh.bmj.com/content/42/1/63
In 2015-16 I was Co-Investigator on an AHRC Networking project, 'Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind' with Prof Ulrika Maude (PI, University of Bristol) and Prof Laura Salisbury (Co-I, University of Exeter), extending the work done in the course of the 'Beckett and Brain Science' project.
As part of this project, I considered the usefulness of the philosophy of psychiatry, and in particular phenomenological psychiatry, in thinking about modernist literature (Woolf, Beckett, Proust) and its representation of disordered experiences of selfhood, time, space and the body.
2016-2022: I was an international project partner on a Norwegian Research Council project, Historicizing the Ageing Self, run by Prof Margery Vibe Skagen at the University of Bergen, Norway. More information can be found here:
http://www.uib.no/en/project/ageing
I have a monograph in preparation that has grown out these awards:
Embodied Time: Ageing in Modern Literature and Thought (contracted to Bloomsbury)
I was the sole author of an Impact Case Study, 'Ageing as Embodied Time' for the 2021 REF.
Selected recent publications:
- a chapter, 'The Ageing Body', in Hillman and Maude (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature (2015)
- an article on Beckett and the contingency of old age in Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd'hui (2016)
- an article on the poetics of ageing in the work of Marcel Proust and Roland Barthes in Textual Practice (2018)
- an article on ageing, embodiment and experience in J. M. Coetzee and Alice Munro in the European Journal of English Studies (2018)
- a chapter on age and the contemporary American short story in Falcus and Sako (ed.), Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (2022)
- an article on dementia, laughter and performative language in Poetics Today (2023)
- a chapter on the phenomenology of frailty in Falcus, Hartung and Medina (eds.), Bloomsbury Handbook of Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (2023)
- a chapter on Audre Lorde, Black writing, and intersectional ageing in the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging (2023)
- an article entitled 'The Phenomenology of Dementia: Time, Emotion, and Relationality in Life and Lifewriting' in Age Culture Humanities, Vol. 7 (2023): Age, Culture, Humanities (special issue: "Transitional and Relational Aging: Part 1") [my two part special issue with Margery Vibe Skagen; second part Vol. 8 (2024): Age, Culture, Humanities (special issue: "Transitional and Relational Aging: Part 2" and Forum: "Too Old for the Job?") | Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal]