About

My research and teaching interests include American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, especially within a world-ecological frame; Marxism, the Frankfurt School and theories of degrowth; modernism/modernity, world-literature and the Anthropocene; and contemporary avant-garde poetry and poetics.

Research interests

My interests lie in the materialist recasting of comparativist methodology in order to explore the origins of modernism in the C19 world-literary system, its development in the C20 moment of ‘three-worlds’ culture, and its recurrent crises in the wake of the postwar Long Boom. In contrast to most work in world-literary studies, I give special emphasis to poetry as a privileged medium for construing the challenges of global consciousness, primarily in poetry’s manifestation as entailing a specific form of address. These interests are reflected in three current studies: World Literature and the Origins of Modernism, which attempts to map the emergence of a C19 global imaginary in poetry through studies of Whitman, Baudelaire, Martí and others; The Non-Aligned: Post-Bandung Poetics, a comparative examination of international poetic relations in the 1950s aftermath of the Non-Aligned Movement; and Post-Capitalist Aesthetics, a preliminary survey of cultural prefigurations of a world order beyond the present era of neoliberal capitalism. Articles on Whitman, Hawthorne, Frank O'Hara, C21 graphic narrative, the history of the Frankfurt School and post-work and ambient aesthetics.

Teaching and supervision

I teach on the BA/MA programmes in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. In addition to those listed above right, I lecture on the following modules:

• Modern World Literatures
• Modes of Reading
• Literature in Theory
• History and Textuality

My postgraduate research supervisions include the following:

• Elizabeth Smith (PhD, expected 2025), The “Environmental Uncanny”: Unsettling the Multispecies Encounter in Contemporary Environmental Poetry (co-supervised with Jonathan Skinner)
• Paul Vernell (PhD, expected 2025), The Poetics of Combined and Uneven Development: Explorations of Time, Space and Alienation in Modernist Poetry
• Sam Weselowski (PhD, expected 2023), The Poetics of Scale: Vancouver & American Poetry
  Writing Against Capital (co-supervised with Myka Tucker-Abramson and Jonathan Skinner)
• Demet Intepe (PhD, 2020), Environmental Justice and Writers as Activists in Multi-Ethnic North American Literatures, Film, and Theater (co-supervised with Pablo Mukherjee)
• Martin Schauss (PhD, 2019), Like a Thing Forsaken: Beckett, Sebald and the Politics of Materiality (co-supervised with Dan Katz)
• Justin Neville Kaushall (PhD, 2018), The Historical Negation of Aesthetic Categories: Adorno’s Inheritance of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (co-supervised with Diarmuid Costello)
• George Ttoouli (PhD, 2017), Twentieth Century US Ecopoetics and Serial Poetic Form
• Nesrin Degirmencioglu (PhD, 2013), Uneven Cities: The Dialectic of Urban Modernity and Literary Form in Dos Passos, Tanpınar, Auster and Pamuk (co-supervised with Maureen Freely)
• William Clarke (PhD, 2009), Perturbed Realism: The Social Novel and Fictitious Capital (co-supervised with Neil Lazarus)

I welcome supervisions in the areas listed under my research interests, above.

Selected publications

• Co-author, with the Warwick Research Collective, "Collectivity and Crisis in the Long Twentieth Century," MLQ: A Journal of Literary History 84.4 (December 2020): 465-489
• "Post-Capitalist Futures: A Report on Imagination." Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, ed. Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion and Andrew Milner (Palgrave, 2020)
• "Everyday Dissent: Colonised Lifeworlds in Twentieth Century Poetry." World Literature and Dissent, ed. Lorna Burns and Katie Muth (Routledge, 2019)
• Co-author, with the Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015)
• How to Read Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Pluto Press, forthcoming)
• "General Introduction." The Collected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming)
• Co-editor, with Marta Werner, Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne (American Philosophical Society, 2006)
• "Frank O’Hara in New York: Race Relations, Poetic Situations, Postcolonial Space” (Comparative American Studies 4.1, 2006)
• Co-editor, with Kristin Dykstra, North American Language Poetries, 1965–2000 (Havana: Casa de Letras, 2005)
• Editor, special feature on Language poet Bruce Andrews, Jacket 22 (jacketmagazine.com/22/)
• "World Echoes: Caribbeanness as Method" (Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 12, 2003)

Professional associations

• British Association for American Studies
• Modernist Studies Association