RGS

Biography

Biography

Raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme, I read English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, winning a College Scholarship and graduating in 2006, before going on to complete an MLitt in Film Journalism (with Film Theory) at Glasgow University in 2008. After working as a freelance culture journalist and online editor in the art-publishing sector, whilst preparing a research project on Deleuzean affects and anti-Francoist aesthetic subversion  in 1970s Spanish alternative  cinema, I then briefly pursued part-time Mphi/Dphil research in post-Communist Polish cinema and temporality before training to be, and working as, a support worker and project co-ordinator for 3 years in London. In 2016 I switching my primary academic focus back towards Literature and completed an MA in English Literature at Keele University.

During my Masters I looked to develop a number of new critical lines, including mapping Deleuzean-inflected ontologies of Braidotti and Jane Bennett into literary theory in order to develop the category of  ‘Deleuzean enchanted-realist ecocriticism’. My dissertation read several works of contemporary literature concerned with working-class milieus, including Lisa Blower’s Sitting Ducks, Anthony Cartwright’s Iron Towns and Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo through a framework which rethought the later-work of Raymond Williams within a post-Derridean Haunt-ology to explore literary accounts of class-based  ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ practices, bodies  and spaces in the context of dyschronia, theories of memory and the collapse of class-based political projects (with particular attention to the work of Mark Fisher, and Owen  Hatherley’s post-Benjaminian readings of industrial ruins and modernist architecturally-embodied imaginaries).                     

I am now pursuing a  PhD in Contemporary English Literature at the same institution, supervised by Nicholas Bentley and  Ceri Morgan.  This Phd research is a continuation and expansion, in scope and theoretical depth, of my Masters Dissertation work on the Contemporary Working Class in literature.

Alongside my research, I am the Humanities Post-Graduate Research Committee co-Rep whilst  serving on the Post-graduate Research Forum Committee and on the Post-Graduate Symposium Committee.  Beyond this I am involved with the Geopoetics group ‘Dawdlers’ run by Dr Ceri Morgan, an active member of Keele’s Creative  Writing Society and serve on the Keele Chapel committee as Cassoc co-Rep. Outside of my life at Keele, I am an A-Level/University Entrance Tutor in English Literature, Cultural Studies and Film Theory as well as a relief Community Support Worker (with specialisms in Mental Health and Substance Misuse).