The debate over "gold" open access in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) was explored in February in the Times Higher Education cover story. The article featured interview material with Dr Martin Paul Eve and myself, as Academic Project Directors of the Open Library...

I'm delighted to be able to announce the launch of an open access project called the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). My colleague at Lincoln Dr Martin Paul Eve and I are the Academic Project Directors of this initiative, which will establish a journal and...

I've been invited to contribute an article to a special issue of the journal Paradoxa titled "African Science Fiction," edited by Dr Mark Bould. Having taught Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi (1984) for my 3rd year Science Fiction module recently (more module info here),...

In April 2013, my PhD student Chris Callow and I co-organised a conference dedicated to SF writer and academic Adam Roberts titled "New Genre Army: An International Conference on the Writing of Adam Roberts." The conference is part of the Gylphi "Contemporary Writers:...

I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to the US in Autumn 2011 to attend a fantastic conference, "Critical Refusals: The 4th Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society," held at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2011. Whilst this was the biennial conference...

I've been developing a new literary methodology for analysing twenty-first century British fictions over the course of the past 5 years, and one of my preoccupations is the way in which time functions in many novels: not only in terms of an increasingly self-relflexive temporal...

On 14th-15th September 2012 Tony Venezia and I co-organised a 2-day academic conference dedicated to the writing of China Miéville, called "Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville." The conference was...

I recently worked with Dr Sarah Dillon from the University of St Andrews and Anthony Levings, the Managing Editor of the arts and humanities publisher Gylphi, to organise a two-day international conference dedicated to the work of British novelist Maggie Gee. The conference brought...

I've been invited as a plenary speaker to the forthcoming conference "Will Self and the Art of the Contemporary," to be held at the University of Roehampton on Saturday 1st December 2012. See here for the call for papers. After an invigorating MA class on Will Self's The Book...

On Friday 18th May I'll be joining the Guardian Higher Education Network for their weekly Live Chat blog. This week's discussion will be focused around "How to be a good lecturer" and I'll be posting as well as answering any questions. You can join the chat from 12:00 to...

In the Autumn semester of 2012 I'll be teaching on the University of Lincoln's core second-year module "Making it New: An Introduction to Literary Modernism." The module aims to enable students to read (and enjoy) modernist texts and to understand the differences between...

On Wednesday 2nd May I was invited to join Siren FM's "Midweek Drive" evening show, joining presenter Alex Lewczuk. Guests included the documentary film-maker Phil Leirness, Sci-Fi London fillm festival director Louis Savy, X-Files actor Dean Haglund, and Hollywood writer...

In July 2012 I delivered a paper on Hari Kunzru's latest novel Gods Without Men (Penguin, 2011) at the University of Lincoln's 'What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English" organised by Dr Siân Adiseshiah and Dr Rupert Hildyard. My paper, "Towards a...

One of the chapters of my monograph, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the 21st Century British Novel, explores the genre of post-apocalypse through a reading of Ernst Bloch's philosophy of "natural historical time." Many critics have commented upon the wave of SF and...

In June 2012 I launched an online journal of literary criticism called Alluvium. Martin Paul Eve is co-editing the journal with me, which publishes monthly articles on new directions in twenty-first century literature as well as twenty-first century critical approaches to the canon....

Having worked extensively on the thinking of Ernst Bloch in my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the Twenty-First Century British Novel, I was keen to research Bloch's own literary criticism in more detail. In April 2010 I was able to start mapping out some of the key...

Building on my research into British novelists Jeanette Winterson, Marina Warner, Doris Lessing, Maggie Gee and Ali Smith, in the Autumn semester of 2012 I will be contributing to the team-taught MA module on the University of Lincoln's MA in 21st Century Literature, "Women Writing...

I've spent the last 6 years researching theories of utopianism and their literary counterparts so am delighted to be teaching on the University of Lincoln's MA optional module "Writing Utopia and Dystopia" this year. The module starts with Thomas More’s...

I'm currently finishing my first monograph, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the Contemporary British Novel. The book interrogates representations of time within the late twentieth- and early-twenty-first century British novel. Central to this study is the assertion that utopian...

I've recently been involved in running the Capital Reading Group at the University of Lincoln, which meets every fortnight during term-time to read and discuss Marx's first volume of Das Kapital (in English – the Ben Fowkes translation). The group has a facebook page if you'd...

As part of my developing interest in science fiction and fantasy literature, I've recently written a new optional module for third-year students at the University of Lincoln. The module will give students the opportunity to analyse the genre of modern science fiction (SF) and its...

This year I've been teaching on the MA in 21st Century Literature at the University of Lincoln. One of our optional modues, "21st Century Literary Theory," has now been redesigned by Dr Lorna Burns and myself and will run in its new form in the Spring semester...

  This film screening series will accompany the third-year optional module on Science Fiction that I'm teaching in the Autumn term 2012. Week 1 | Origins Le Voyage dans La Lune (1902) (dir. Georges Méliès) Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924) (dir....

I am currently Module Convenor for the core first-year module "Introduction to Narrative" at the University of Lincoln. Structured around Seymour Chatman's excellent and accessible text, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), the module gives...

I am currently supervising one PhD student, Christos Callow, who is in his first year of the PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. Christos is interested in utopian theory, dystopian narratives and science fiction, and his doctoral dissertation will be composed of a collection...

I am currently Module Convenor for the MA optional module "London Now" on the University of Lincoln's MA in 21st Century Literature. The module is team-taught, and introduces students to the many and varied ways in which contemporary writers and dramatists have constructed the...

I've become fascinated with literary representation of transmigration (see, for example, my chapter on transmigration in David Mitchell: Critical Essays). One of the most interesting examples of this kind of writing is Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993), which...

In September 2008 I co-organised a one-day AHRC-funded international conference with Dr Matthew Mead and Dr Alexander Dunst at the University of Nottingham titled "New Radical Subjectivities: Rethinking Agency for the 21st Century." The conference attracted a diverse range of...

In April 2011 I co-organised "Spaces of Alterity: Conceptualising Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Practices and Narratives" at the University of Nottingham with Dr Michael Eades and Dr Adity Singh. The conference received an overwhelming response from academics, educators, artists and...

Whilst working at the University of Surrey, I designed a third-year optional module on “The Twenty-First Century British Novel.” The module offers students the opportunity to explore the British novel and its formal and thematic developments from 2000 to the present day –...

During the course of organising the conference "Spaces of Alterity: Conceptualising Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Practices and Narratives" (which took place in April 2011 at the University of Nottingham), Dr Michael Eades, Dr Adity Singh and I were approached by colleagues at the...

In April 2011 I worked with the lovely Emily Wilczek, who co-organises the not-for-profit arts organisation Annexinema. As part of the "Spaces of Alterity: Conceptualising Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Practices and Narratives" conference at the University of Nottingham (which I...

In September 2009 I delivered a conference paper at the David Mitchell conference organised by Dr Sarah Dillon and sponsored by the arts and humanities publisher Gylphi. The conference was an incredible experience and launched a series of conferences dedicated to living writers, in which the...

In 2010-2011 I was Module Convenor for the second-year core undergraduate module "Contemporary Literatures in a Global Context" at the University of Surrey. More content coming...

In 2010-2011 I taught on the core first-year undergraduate module "Genres and Contemporary Writing" at the University of Surrey. More content coming...

As part of my interest in sharing academic scholarship with a broader audience beyond the university, I’ve published 2 shorter versions of author interviews with David Mitchell and Jon McGregor in the New Statesman. During the course of my research I’ve become fascinated with the...

In the summer of 2010 a good friend and remarkable poet, Éireann Lorsung, organised a seven-month project and poetry exchange "I am an American Poet: This is American Poetry" in Nottingham. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview two of the visiting poets, Zachary...

In February 2008 and February 2010 I interviewed the novelist Jon McGregor whose first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury 2002), had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and The Sunday...

In September 2009 I was invited to deliver a paper at the annual Workshops in Political Theory held at Manchester Metropolitan University. My paper explored the "inner-space fiction" of Doris Lessing through the conceptual framework of the philosophy of solidarity (as developed by my...

Whilst researching my PhD at the University of Nottingham, I co-founded and co-organised the Marx Reading Group with my friends and colleagues Dr Adity Singh and Dr Alexander Dunst. To accompany the growing interest in the group, we decided to run annual film screenings of films and...

Having worked on Jim Crace’s fiction as part of my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the 21st Century British Novel, I was keen to meet the critically-acclaimed novelist and Jim kindly agreed to let me interview him at his house in Birmingham. Between numerous cups of tea I...

In July 2009 I presented some of my work on Jacques Derrida's influential Sepcters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge, 1994) at the 10th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, held at the Unviersity of Porto in...

I've been interested in the writings of Walter Benjamin since my MA in Critical Theory at the University of Warwick in 2005. More content coming soon.

In 2008 I designed and taught half of the first- and second-year optional undergraduate module "Introduction to Postmodernism" at the University of Nottingham. More content coming...

In June 2007 I delivered a paper on Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (Faber & Faber, 1995) at Livepool Hope University at a conference organised by Dr Sebastian Groes, "Kazuo Ishiguro and the International Novel." More content coming...

When I first joined the University of Nottingham's Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies to start my PhD research in 2006 I was keen to build on my reading of Frankfurt School ciritcal theory (my MA at the University of Warwick focused exclusively on critical theory). My...

Since my undergraduate 10,000 word dissertation on Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially-Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981), I've been fascinated by Jameson's immense ouevre. His publication of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called...