I completed my PhD at The University of Nottingham with a thesis on the 19th Century US Short Story and Theatre. This work became the basis of my first monograph - The Drama of the American Short Story (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

Between 2010 and 2012 I held a Leverhulme postdoc at Nottingham to work on the relationship between class politics and anthropology in 19th -and 20th- century US literature and culture. This work informed my second monograph, Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Edinburgh UP, 2023). I also edited the new Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (CUP, 2023) with Prof. Gavin Jones (Stanford).

Following a lectureship at The University of Kent, I joined King’s in Sept. 2018. Most recently, I have been working on a cultural and literary history of intelligence testing in the U.S. as part of an AHRC Early Career project entitled, “Literary Culture, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence, 1880- 1920” (2017 - 2019).

I am also beginning a new book project on American Literature and the Civil Service.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• American Intellectual History
• American Studies
• The American Short Story
• Ethnicity and Class in U.S. Literature and Culture
• American Realism and Modernism
• American Popular Music

Teaching

I teach widely in American Literature/American Studies from European Settlement through to the Contemporary.

Selected Publications

• Co-Editor w. Gavin Jones - The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (CUP, 2023)
• Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
• The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 – 1865 (University of Michigan, 2016)
• "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: Mark Twain’s Critique of Progressive era Meritocracy" (Textual Practice, Sept 2021)
• "Afropessimism, Liminal Hotspots and Claude McKay’s Aesthetic of Sovereign Rejection in Romance in Marseille" (English Language Notes, September 2020)