My most recent book is called Alarm (Bloomsbury, 2023) and focuses on the history and cultural meaning of alarms, alerts, sirens and warnings. This little book develops some interests in alertness, waking, vigilance, safety cultures and health/medical humanities which I've been working on for a few years. My research on related topics includes some ongoing work in critical sleep studies which looks at representations of sleeplessness in contemporary writing. Some of this research was funded by a Wellcome Trust Small Grant for Medical Humanities scholarship.

My second monograph, Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bloomsbury, 2018), investigated literature's engagement with the concepts of managed attention and distraction. You can read some reviews of this book in The TLS, C21 and The Review of English Studies. My first monograph, Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave, 2012), analysed the narrative strategies of fictional afterlives.

I am currently writing a short book about the work of Ali Smith for the Writers and their Work series from Liverpool University Press. I'm also deputy editor of C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-First-Century Writings, the open-access journal of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies.

Here is my ORCID profile.

If you're interested in my work on sleep, you might enjoy my contributions to the BBC's Free Thinking programme on Sleep Justice and Sleeplessness from April 2024.

You can read an introduction to some of my work on attention in this summary of a talk called Reading Against the Attention Crisis which I gave to a group of tech ethicists in 2023.

I've also written on HE issues in various places, including Wordplay and The New Statesman.

Spring 2025

ENG125 Introduction to British Literature and Culture

ENG336 Post-Imperial Imaginaries: Writing the Nation in Modern Britain

Past courses

Undergraduate

The Business of Books: Publishing, Marketing and Bookselling

Fiction after the Fifties 1: 1960-2000

Fiction after the Fifties 2: 2000 to the present

Post-1945 Literatures

Experimental Fiction

Literary Theory

Modernism

American Literature

Academic Writing Workshop Tutorial

Undergraduate Research Tutorial

Postgraduate

The Art of Graphic Narrative

Science Fiction

Literary Theory and Practice

The Literature of Fantasy

Advanced Master’s Research Skills

Books

• Ali Smith. Writers and their Work series. Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2026.
• Alarm. Object Lessons series. Bloomsbury, 2023.
• Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century. Bloomsbury, 2018.
• Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction. Palgrave, 2012.

 Journal Articles

• '"People with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up": Sleep Solidarity and Fictions of Mass Sleeplessness'. MFS 68.3, 2022: 525-543.
• '"This Ridiculous Thing that Passes for a Passport": Seeking Asylum in Ali Smith's Fiction". Contemporary Women's Writing 12.3, 2018: 322-337.
• 'Cold Reading A. L. Kennedy's The Blue Book'. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.2, 2015: 173-189.
• 'Anticipated Returns: Purgatory, Exchange and Narrative After Life'. The Oxford Literary Review 31.1, 2009: 33-48.
• 'Unquiet Spirits: Death Writing in Contemporary Fiction'. Textual Practice 23.3, 2009: 461-479.

Chapters in Essay Collections

• ‘Artful Sweetness: Twee Aesthetics in Ali Smith’s Short Stories’. Ali Smith: Critical Essays. Eds. Eleanor Byrne and Alex Calder. Routledge, forthcoming 2025. 
• 'Watching and Waking: Between Critical Sleep Studies and Critical Attention Studies'. Sleep and its Meanings. Ed. Diletta de Cristofaro. MIT Press, forthcoming 2025.
• ‘The Ethics of Carelessness: Inattention in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. The Ethics of (In)attention. Eds. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau. Routledge, 2024.
• 'Fiction in the Age of Distraction: Reading and Attention in the 2010s'. The 2010s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction. Eds. Philip Tew, Emily Horton, Nick Hubble and Nick Bentley. Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024.
• 'Wallace and Attention'. David Foster Wallace in Context. Ed. Clare Hayes-Brady. Cambridge UP, 2022.
• '"'Tuning into my 'awareness continuum'": Optimized Attention in The Yips'. Nicola Barker: Critical Essays. Ed. Berthold Schoene. Gylphi, 2020.
• 'Literature and Afterlife'. The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Eds. Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy and Michelle Wang. Routledge, 2020.
• 'Afterlife'. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature: Literary Theory. Ed. John Frow et al. OUP, 2019.
• 'Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan's Twenty-First Century Novels'. What Happens Now: 21st-Century Writing. Eds. Sian Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard. Palgrave, 2013.

Special Editions of Journals

• Co-editor, with Arin Keeble, Melissa Schuh and Denise Wong. The Century at 25. Special Issue of C21 Literature, forthcoming 2025.
• Co-editor, with Peter Sloane. The Short Things. Special Issue of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies 1.2, 2019.
• Co-editor, with Naomi Banks. Afterlives. Special issue of Kaleidoscope 4.1, 2010.

Reviews

• “Seeing Through Attention” Essay review of recent work in attention studies. American Literary History 37.1, 2025.
• "Humble Attentions" Essay review of The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative by Jean-Michel Ganteau, Contemporary Literature, 63.3, 2023, 430-436.
• Review of Time and Literature, by Thomas M. Allen, Modern Language Review, 115.2, 2020: 439-440.
• Review of The Cruft of Fiction, by David Letzler, Modern Language Review 113.4, 2018: 874-875.