Forskningsinteresser

I research contemporary anglophone literature and its connections with the socio-political domain. I’m interested in literature as a space in which pressing political and social questions are explored, and in the distinct and vital contribution that literature and literary aesthetics can make to understanding and acting in the socio-political sphere.

In recent years, I have primarily been working on literary approaches to questions of class, labour, and gender.  From 2021 to 2025 I was the PI of the project Feminized: A New Literary History of Women’s Work, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. The project showed how the archive of literary representations of conventional ‘women’s work’ can be used to understand the contemporary feminization of the labour market. Many of the major findings of the project appear in the collection Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature, published by Edinburgh University Press (2025).  

I have also worked extensively on the concept of precarity; I co-edited the volume Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and my monograph Precarity, Alcohol and Contemporary British and Irish Literature will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2026.

I am currently working on a new project which is about the concept and practice of mindfulness. I am especially interested in the attitudes towards thought which characterise mindfulness and which are elaborated in literary texts – the ways literary approaches to the thinking mind might connect with, but also diverge from, those which underlie mindfulness ideas – and in the uses of mindfulness in neoliberal contexts.

Another current project is a textbook for students about new approaches to studying literature in context, which developed from our teaching in the English programme at SDU. It will be published by Routledge in 2027.

My PhD (Queen Mary University of London 2015) and earlier academic research was about literature and human rights, and I continue to be interested in literary approaches to human rights discourse and its complexities.

I would be glad to hear from any potential collaborators with interests in these areas.