I completed my PhD at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, in 2017, and was appointed in the Department of English at King’s in the same year. I hold a BA from the University of East Anglia, an MA from University College London, and worked in London for several years before returning to academia.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

My forthcoming book, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction, argues that contemporary feminized poetry offers a radical critique of capitalism when it traces capital’s processual remakings of gendered and racial difference. To this end, I reinterpret Marx’s theory of value to show how it provides the basis for a new, more capacious type of Marxist literary criticism – one that is sensitized to the reproduction of social difference in a world of infinite diversity. Reading trans, queer, Indigenous and diasporic poetries from the US and Canada, Behind Our Backs advances a feminist reading method attuned to the way social forms are shaped by capital’s inner logics and tendencies, and to the highly ambivalent and dialectical ways in which capitalist subjects (dis)identify with these forms.

A second book-in-progress, Marxism and Difference, addresses the longstanding impasse between poststructuralist and Marxist accounts of difference in contemporary literature and culture, reading global Anglophone poetry alongside media and visual art emerging from feminist and Indigenous struggles over social reproduction, particularly in Latin America. Other completed, forthcoming projects include an edited special issue, “Sexual Difference and Trans Moral Panics,” for Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, and an article on lyric, black radicalism and dialectics for differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

I welcome PhD proposals aligned in any way with my research and/or the following areas:

• Late twentieth and early twenty-first century poetry and poetics
• Marxist literary criticism and aesthetic theory
• Studies of social reproduction, gender, and sexuality
• Latin American feminisms
• Marxist studies of racialization, especially as they relate to black feminist methodologies and Indigenous and First Nations activism and political theory

Selected publications

• “Recasting Dialectics: Hannah Black’s Deep Cuts,” in “Lyric and Containment,” eds. Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 36.2 (September 2025, forthcoming)
• “Poems We Live With: The Victorious Ones.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 50 (Autumn 2024).
• “Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Marxist-Feminism and Literary Study,” After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• “Manly Things,” On Bernadette Mayer, eds. Kristin Grogan and David Hobbs, Post45 Contemporaries, 27 July 2021.
• “Against Objectivism: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism, eds. W. Scott Howard and Broc Rossell (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2018).
• Toward. Some. Air.: Remarks on Poetics. Co-edited with Fred Wah (Banff, Alberta: Banff Centre Press, 2015).

Teaching

I teach a wide range of contemporary literature, media, literary criticism and theory at postgraduate and undergraduate level. I designed and convene our team-taught first-year module, “Writing Race, Writing Gender,” and a specialist third-year module on identity and the politics of representation. I offer an MA module that introduces graduate students to new readings of Marx, and I regularly teach two other graduate modules, ‘Thinking the Contemporary: Literature and Theory After Postmodernism’, and ‘Post-45: Literature, Culture, Theory’. I also sometimes convene our MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory.

Expertise and Public Engagement

I have long been an active member of poetry communities in the UK, US and Canada, and I recently published a new collection, Not a Force of Nature (New York: Futurepoem, 2024). My poems have been published in chapbooks and magazines, widely anthologized, and translated into Spanish and Catalan. With the Canadian poet laureate Fred Wah, I edited a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press, 2015).

In recent years I have organised public-facing symposia on topics including social reproduction and poetry’s relation to labour practices, and I have given invited public talks at universities, women’s centres and arts organisations in the UK, US, Canada, France and The Netherlands. I am on the editorial board of the Bloomsbury Academic Press book series, Critical Theory and the Critique of Society, and I regularly review manuscripts for other journals and presses.