¹û¶³Ó°Ôº

What is your role and what does it involve?Ìý

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, with a specialism in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. I teach on the Department’s English BA and on its MA in Issues in Modern Culture and supervise PhD students. In practice this means giving seminars and lectures on a wide range of authors (Woolf, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Alan Hollinghurst, among others), but also regularly meeting with students for one-on-one tutorials and supervisions. The role also involves a good deal of marking and admissions interviewing. Over the last two years I’ve been convening the MA in Issues in Modern Culture, which involves curating the programme of seminars on offer, overseeing admissions decisions, and chairing the annual Exam Board. I devote any time that remains to research – which in effect happens mainly during university vacations.Ìý

How long have you been at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº and what was your previous role?Ìý

I’ve been at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº for 13 years – first as a Teaching Fellow, then as a Lecturer, and, since 2018, as an Associate Professor. Before moving to London I was a Research Fellow (or, more arcanely, a ‘Fellow by Examination’) at Magdalen College, Oxford. Ìý

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?Ìý

Academic life affords different kinds of challengeÌýand satisfaction. In terms of my research, I’m most proud of my two books – ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (2012), and The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity (2019). I’m proud of the first because it was my first, and laid the foundation for all my work on Joyce and modernism since; and I’m proud of the second because it was written alongside the fulfilment of heavy Departmental duties, and often felt like an impossibly difficult and arduous task to complete. Ìý

In terms of my teaching, one of the most rewarding things I’ve done is run an MA module entitled ‘Cultures of Offence’, which sought, in an age of ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’, to ponder the importance of offensive literature – its historical role in the disarming of taboos, the shifting of values, and the recognition of difference. Those seminars gave rise to some of the most engaging and thought-provoking conversations I’ve had in the classroom.Ìý

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of your to-do listÌý

My new project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is to write a monograph about modern conceptions of selfhood as they are reflected in contemporary autofiction ‘(literature, that is, in which authors take their own life as their subject-matter whilst also partaking of the licences of fiction).Ìý The authors I plan to focus on are Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux, Ben Lerner, and Édouard Louis. After spending the first twenty years of my academic life working primarily on James Joyce and the relatively abstruse literary-critical theory of intertextuality (which considers the forms and effects of quotation, allusion, and other kinds of connection between texts), I’m excited to be immersing myself in a new set of writings and a new set of questions. Ìý

What is your favourite album, film and novel?Ìý

I’ve never been any good at ‘favourites’ questions. My tastes and preferences are changing all the time. In the past year, I’ve particularly enjoyed experiencing or re-experiencing The Best of Talking Heads (2004), °Õá°ù (2022), directed by Todd Field, and Transit (2016) by Rachel Cusk.Ìý

What is your favourite joke (pre-watershed)?Ìý

To be honest, I don’t really like jokes that much – if what we’re talking about are memorized little stories with more or less surprising punchlines. What I do love is unexpected, razor-sharp, super-dry wit. And I love puns too – the more multilingual the better (that’s what comes of spending years trying to make sense of Finnegans Wake I suppose).Ìý

Who would be your dream dinner guests?Ìý

Another tricky question! There are so many people I’d like to meet and dine with. Almost at random then, and for the sake of eclectic mixing, I’d bring together: Jacob Collier – for his irrepressible enthusiasm, technicolour clothes, and astonishing musical genius; Robert Sapolsky – for his neuroscientific wisdom and the humorous twinkle in his eyes; and Rachel Cusk – for her wry novelistic analyses of contemporary life, the literary world, and personal relationships.Ìý

What advice would you give your younger self?Ìý

I tended, not very originally, to feel things very strongly when I was younger. I seem to be a little less prone to intensity these days, which is a relief. But I’m certain my younger self would not have known how to act on such obvious advice as ‘don’t take things so much to heart’. Only life itself, I think, can impart such lessons.Ìý

What would it surprise people to know about you?Ìý

Perhaps that I love speed and flight – skiing, paragliding, hot-air-ballooning, skydiving. ÌýÌý

What is your favourite place?  Ìý

The balcony of the chalet in the French Alps where I spent a lot of my childhood. The mountain light and mountain air, the distant chiming of church bells and the braying of the village donkey, the paragliders silently gliding over the roof on their way down to the valley below – these all make for a deep tranquillity which I don’t experience anywhere else.Ìý