My research focuses on modern and contemporary literature and theory, with particular emphasis on time, narrative theory, reading, method and critical practice. I am currently working on the relationship between time, reading, and the university. I am also interested in bibliophobia, bad uses of literature, and negative/traumatic reading experiences. I work at the intersections of literature, theory, and the sociology of reading.

 

I joined the University of Southern Denmark in 2025 as Professor of Literature in the Department of Culture and Language, and Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS).

 

In 2024-2025, I held a Research Fellowship at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. In 2024, I held a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. 

 

I was the PI on a research project funded by the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) that examines the relationship between the value of reading and time use in the twenty-first-century university. The rationale for this research is to see when, how, and why academics and students read. The main output of this project will be a book provisionally titled Reading At University. My article 'Critical Reading and the Fantasy of Method' is in press with PMLA.

 

From 2020-2022, I collaborated with Christina Lupton and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt on the Carlsberg Foundation 'Lockdown Reading Project', which led to the co-authored monograph Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022; awarded the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize).

 

My first monograph, Sex, Time and Space in Contemporary Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. I am the editor of two book collections, John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2020), and (with Jana Funke), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). I have published numerous articles and chapters on reading, time, and contemporary literature.

 

From 2025-2026, I was Chair of University English, one of the main bodies that promotes the study of English in universities in the UK. I am a member of the Institute of English Studies Advisory Council, and an Advisory Board Member of the journal C21. In 2025, I was appointed a member of the English sub-panel for the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF).