I completed my PhD, which dealt with the commodification of dissent in mid 20th century transatlantic literature, at Lancaster University in 2009. I continued to work at Lancaster teaching on the Theory and Practice of Criticism module before coming to work at Cumbria University in 2011. I currently teach on a range of courses, including two modules for the Literature, Romanticism and the English Lake District MA, which reflect my diverse academic interests.
My research is generally directed towards humanity's problematic relationship with our environment and in particular towards representations that either reinforce or destabilise what remains a dominant anthropocentric perspective. Past research has been underpinned by ideas emerging from the related fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial theory and included work connecting disparate writers such as Daniel Defoe and David Mitchell with the Anthropocene. I was more recently engaged in thinking about representations of Cumbria and the Lake District in contemporary culture, with a particular focus on the ways in which narratives representing the region are often shaped by wider cultural misunderstandings.
I'm currently thinking about what Hunter Lovins called 'global weirding' and the ways in which - following Mark Fisher's ideas about the weird - global weirdness's, both provoking and provoked by anthropogenic climate change, might be visible in elements of contemporary Cumbrian culture.
