Following a PhD at Birkbeck (London Consortium), I spent four years in Germany, first as a post-doctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and then in the Media Faculty of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

I returned to London in 2014 to take up a lectureship at Queen Mary University of London, where I worked for several years. Before joining King's, I spent four years in the English Department at UCL. During this time, I began a training as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society.

While undertaking this clinical training, I have worked as a psychotherapist in the NHS, first in the Parkside Clinic (CNWL) and, more recently, SLaM, where I am based in Secondary Care Psychological Therapies.

In the English Department at King's, I am Deputy Senior Tutor, and I have a particular interest in the complex interface between academic and pastoral responsibilities involved in personal tutoring.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Romanticism (esp. scientific and medical contexts)
• Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• Laurence Sterne
• Psychoanalysis (clinical and critical uses of)

My research focuses on connections between narrative fiction, scientific epistemology and the history of media. I am writing a book on techniques of self-experimentation (uses of the body as an instrument of research) from European Romanticism to psychoanalysis.

Teaching

At King's, my teaching focuses predominantly on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century: e.g., Rise of the Novel, Placing Austen, Gothic: Apparitions, Delusions, Romanticism. But I also convene the core first-year module, Reading Past, Reading Present. And this year, I will also be teaching Literature and Psychoanalysis.

Selected publications

‘An Archaeology of the Analyzing Instrument: Otto Isakower’s Self-Experiment’, Psychoanalysis and History 25.1 (2023), 189-221.

‘Mysticism: The Anaesthetics of Religious Experience’ in Daniel Whistler (ed.), Edinburgh History of Nineteenth-Century Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 320-338.

‘Science and the Scientific Disciplines’ in Paul Hamilton (ed.) Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 684-710.

‘Cognition/Volition: Two Figures of the Human in the Age of Experimental Systems’, in Christoph F. E. Holzhey (ed.), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potentials of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (Wien: Turia & Kant Verlag, ‘Cultural Inquiry’, 2014), pp. 113-140.

‘Bacon / Böhme . . Hegel – James’, Slovenian trans. by Maja Lovrenov in Mladen Dolar (ed.), Problemi 9-10 (2014), pp. 47-73.