About

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Until 2023, I was a Teaching Associate at Royal Holloway University of London and a Research Associate at the University of York. My first book, Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of the first generation New York School poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Reappraising the much-debated New York School label, the book shows how these writers constructed poetic spaces, structures, surfaces, and apertures, and sought to figure themselves and their readers in relation to these architextual sites.

My current research project, entitled Breathturn, explores the prevalence of breathlessness in postwar Anglophone poetics. Adopting the term ‘breathturn’ from the poet Paul Celan, I trace the emergence of a literary turn towards asphyxiation, coded through avant-garde poetic practice as well as through different modes of critical thinking from 1950 to the present. Through close readings of the work of Amiri Baraka, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, Denise Riley, Lisa Robertson, Keston Sutherland, Sean Bonney, Juliana Spahr, and others, this project considers the ways in which breathlessness has shaped postcolonial, feminist, Marxist and ecological trends in modern and contemporary poetry.

Research interests

Breath Poetics; The New York School; Marxism; Feminism; Ecopoetics; Postcolonial Poetics; Cultural Criticism; Poetics and Architecture; Poetics and Visual Arts; Poetry and Poetics

 

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Modules

• EN2K1 and EN3K1 American Poetry

 

Selected publications

• Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
• The Time is Now. The Architecture of Silence (ed. C. White). Rome: Contrasto, 2023.
• Conspiration: On Poetry and Breathing. The Contemporary Journal 4 (December 07, 2022).
• “Remember to slam the parentheses behind you”: structures of attention in the lyric poetry of James Schuyler. Textual Practice, 36:5, 2022, 732-750. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1839958.
• Telltale misadventure: A review of Steven Seidenberg’s Anon. Jacket2, University of Pennsylvania. December 2022.

 Forthcoming

• ‘Frank O’Hara in New York’. Frank O’Hara in Context (ed. A. Epstein), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.
• Cities of Global Modernism. Special issue of Modernist Cultures (co-editor), 2025.
• Review of The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems of Bunny Lang. PN Review. Manchester: Carcanet, 2024.

 

Qualifications

• PhD (Royal Holloway University of London & Yale University, 2020)
• MA (University of Sussex, 2015)
• BA (University of Sussex, 2014)