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...

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...

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 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 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 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...

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...