About

I teach the theory of the book, very broadly defined, and work on the history of reading from the eighteenth century to the present. At Warwick my courses include modules on literature and time, the eighteenth century, and contemporary fiction and media theory. I supervise students in all of these areas. My recent research has been into the history of reading as an activity that is both materially defined by the codex format, and politically tied up with the history of work and leisure. Reading and the Making of Time (JHU, 2018) explores these themes in the context of a group of eighteenth-century readers, largely women, and mostly professionals, who make and struggle for time for books in their lives. You can read some online reviews of it here: The Book is a Time Machine LARB Hedgehog Review TLS  Critical Inquiry and an extract of it here at LitHub,

There's a podcast of me talking about not having time to read here: How to Read

My next book, Love and the Novel: Life as a Twenty-First Century Reader (forthcoming with Profile Press) explores reading in a more recent and less academic context. This book is part-memoir, part investigation of the ways fictional representations of love have converged with and departed from the experiences of real life life lovers during the last half century.

In Copenhagen, I am the PI on a Carlsberg funded research project, Lockdown Reading. Together with Ben Davies at the University of Portsmouth and a small team of researchers, I am working in this project to capture the experiences of novel reading during 2020. Through interviews and surveys, we are investigating the different ways that fiction has mattered in a time of global crisis and temporal disorientated. Our findings can be found in our Lockdown Reading podcast, and in a co-authored monograph, Viral Novels: What We Read in 2020, which we expect to publish in 2022.

My new solo project looks at relation of work and time in the last fifty years, and the ways in which this registers in the forms of first-person fiction has taken during this period. Paid Leaves: Literature, Work, and Time since 1970 explores the way different strands of twentieth-century theory have imagined the reorganization of the worker’s day and the time to be given to education. I am interested in particular in the work of Michel Serres, Jacques Rancière, Peter Weiss, Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, and Raymond Williams and in recent fictions that engage with the realtionship between work, reading, and temporal experience. You can read published section of the project here: Queer Times for the Straight Book

In the last years, I have held Leverhulme, Humboldt and Carlsberg fellowships. I also continue to write on contemporary issues and media use for publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, n+1 and the TLS, and I speak regularly in both European and North American contexts on contemporary and eighteenth-century themes.

Research interests

Eighteenth-century literature; the historical experience of time; theories of the novel; it-narratives; material cultural studies; theories of media and mediation; systems theory in a literary context.

Teaching and supervision

I supervise projects on eighteenth-century literature, those working at the intersection of media history and literary practice, and students interested more generally in the ways literary texts from all periods engage with their material and institutional contexts.

Recent publications

Books

Love and the Novel: Life as a Twenty-First Century Reader, forthcoming Spring 2022, Profile Press.

Ed. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Oxford World Classics, November 2019.

Reading and the Making of Time, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, August 2018: https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/reading-and-making-time-eighteenth-century

Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2012.

Recent Articles

"Repeat"in Further Reading, ed Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, OUP, 2019

Queer Times for the Straight Book, Post45

Literature and Contingency, a special issue of Textual Practice, ed. Christina Lupton and Carsten Meiner, Spring 2018: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/pQaHYrGtqzCX3UzmpeMU/full

“Paper Ontologies: Reading Sterne with Bruno Latour,” Textual Practice, Volume 30, No 1, Winter 2017

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/uRY5ZIh636km6IGtXC9G/full

“The Novel as the Future Anterior of the Book: Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Ali Smith's The Accidental,” NOVEL, Volume 49, No 3, Fall 2016. pp 504-18.

http://0-novel.dukejournals.org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/content/49/3/504

with Sean Silver, "Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies" The Eighteenth Century, Vol 57, No 2, Summer 2016. pp 165-179.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634860/pdf

“Immersing the Network in Time: from the Where to the When of Print Reading,” Proceedings of the English Institute 2014, special issue of ELH, Vol 83, No 2, Summer 2016. 299-317.

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/621628/pdf

“Codex, Contingency, the Eighteenth-Century Novel” ELH, 81.4, Nov 2014. 1173-1192

"Gender, Materiality and Metaphor on the Eighteenth-Century Page," Studies in English Literature,1500-1900, 54:3, Summer 2014. 605-624.

With Alexander Dick, “On Lecturing and Being Beautiful: Zadie Smith, Elaine Scarry, and the Liberal Aesthetic” English Studies in Canada, Summer 2013

Some of my shorter public humanities essays and reviews are here:

Who is a Beneficiary? You are

Workers as Readers: On Coetzee's Youth and the Poverty of Time

Not Loving, Working!

You've Got Mail

Ferrante on/as Good Sex

The Searcher of Patterns and the Keeper of Things

Reading Social Democracy in Translation

To Read is to Choose

After Mothers' Day 

In Praise of Distraction

Is Our Work Done?

London This Week

Qualifications

• MA (Sussex)
• PhD (Rutgers)