Research interests

My research interests are in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernist poetry; critical theory; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; gender and language; neuroscience and language; the question of evidence.

Research collaborations

WIth Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck), Jocelyn Catty (Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust), Michael Flexer (Exeter), Martin Moore (Exeter) and Raluca Soreanu (Birkbeck) I am part of a Wellcome Funded Collaborative Award, 'Waiting Times', to research the experience of waiting in healthcare.

From 2023 onwards, I will be working as a Co-Invesitgator on a new Wellcome-funded Discovery Award called 'After the End: Lived Experiences and Aftermaths of Diseases, Disasters and Drugs in Global Health'. The project is led by Prof Patricia Kingori (Oxford) and I will be examining the temporal narratives used to frame global health crises and what emerges in their wake.

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students working in the following areas: modernism (broadly, but particularly Samuel Beckett); interdisciplinary approaches to literature and neuroscience; medical humanities (particularly questions of time and care); psyshcoanalysis and literature; modernism and critical theory; literature and ethics; literature, temporality and affect.

Please feel free to email if you would like to discuss your prospective project informally.  

Research students

Current Students

2022 Tsai Tan-hsin, co-supervisor, ‘Temporal Comedy: Samuel Beckett’s Humour’

2021 Harry Caton, first supervisor, ‘The Disabled Poster Child’ (College of Humanities Funded)

2021 Anetta Pangaia, co-supervisor, ‘Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Narrative'

2018 Kelechi Anucha, first supervisor, ‘Waiting and End of Life Narratives’ (Wellcome funded)

2018 Farah Nada, co-supervisor, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Heterotopias’

Students supervised to completion

2022 Joseph Holloway, first supervisor, ‘Self, Self and Other: Conjoinment and Singleton Identity in Literature and Medicine, 1830-present’ (Exeter)

2022 Chao Long Jin, co-supervisor, ‘Holistic Modernism: Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychology’ (Exeter)

2022 Veronica Heney, co-supervisor, ‘Literatures of Self Harm’ (Wellcome funded) (Exeter)

2020 Alex Osborne, co-supervisor, ‘Anxiety in Contemporary Fiction’, (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Bristol/Exeter)

2020 Jackie Hopson, first supervisor, ‘The Psychiatrist in Fiction’ (Exeter)

2019 Ana Tomcic, co-supervisor, ‘Gods and Goods' (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Exeter/Cardiff)

2019 Imola Negy-Seres, co-supervisor, ‘Empathy in Modernist and Contemporary Fiction’ (Exeter)

2018 Emma Geen, co-supervisor, ‘Stories in the Skin’ (South, West and Wales AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership) (Exeter/Bath Spa)

2018 Rachel Murray, co-supervisor, 'The Modernist Exoskeleton: Wyndham Lewis, D H Lawrence, HD, Samuel Beckett' (AHRC-funded) (Bristol/Exeter)

2017 Joshua Powell, first supervsor, 'Perception, Affect, Imagery: Beckett and Psychological Experimentation' (Exeter)

2016 Richard Carter, second supervisor ‘Digital Literature’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2016 Sophia David, second supervisor, ‘Eco-Criticism and Contemporary Fiction’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2015 Oliver Evans, ‘What Can’t be Coded can be Decorded: Reading Writing Performing Finnegans Wake’, co-supervisor (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2015 Hannah Proctor, first supervisor, ‘Russian Revolutionary Psychology’ (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2015 Laura Seymour, co-supervisor, ‘Shakespeare and Neuroscience’ (Birkbeck)

2015 Elizabeth Micakovic, first supervisor, ‘T S Eliot’s Voice:  A Cultural History’ (AHRC funded) (Exeter)

2014 Robert Kiely, first supervisor, ‘Beckett and Mysticism’ (Birkbeck)

2014 Isabelle Zahar, co-supervisor, ‘Discourses of Love in the Western Canon’ (AHRC funded) (Birkbeck)

2013 William Kherbek, co-supervisor, ‘John Ashbery and Cognitive Poetics’ (Birkbeck)

2013 Sean Roberts, first supervisor, ‘Beckett and Levinasian Ethics’ (Birkbeck)

2012 Jamie Wood, first spervisor, ‘The Eye Under the Duck-board: English Modernism, The First World War and the Body’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2012 Cathryn Setz, co-supervisor, ‘Transitive Birds: Non-mammalian Animals and Late Modernist Aesthetics in transition, 1927–1938’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2010 Melissa Bradshaw, co-suprvisor, ‘Plath, Bishop and Psychoanalytic Discourses of Suicide’ (Birkbeck College, AHRC funded)

2006 Richard Cope, ‘Beckett’s Three Dialogues and Contemporary Painting’ (Southbank University) 

Teaching

I have teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; modernity and the contemporary; poststructuralism; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language. 

Modules taught

• EAS3239 - Cultures of Neuroscience
• EASM023 - Dissertation
• EASM151 - Modernism and Material Culture

Biography

After studying for a BA in English and European Literature at Warwick University, I completed an MA in the Theory and Practice of Modern Fiction at Exeter University in 1996. Following this, I studied for a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, which I completed in 2003. From 2003-7, I was a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, and was then awarded an RCUK Fellowship in Science, Techology and Culture (2007-13). In 2013, I became Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

During my time at Birkbeck I became increasingly interested in Medical Humanities and worked with my colleague Joanne Winning to set up a new MA in Medical Humanities, taught in association with the Kent, Sussex and Surrey NHS Deanery. In 2013, I was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Literature at Exeter University and am now Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities. 

I am part of the first generation of my family to sudy at university.