Personal Biography
I was born and raised in Leeds. After attending my local comprehensive school and sixth form college, I studied English Literature at Oxford. I later completed my PhD at the University of Bristol, examining globalisation narratives in contemporary Anglophone Nigerian and Kenyan literature. After my PhD, I held roles as Teaching Fellow at Bristol (2020-2021) and Lecturer at Oxford (Queen’s College, 2021-2022). I joined Corpus at the start of 2023 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, working on a project provisionally titled ‘Cultural Enclosure, Globalisation and the Novel Form’, which looks at writing from Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Britain, and Ireland.
Research and Teaching
My PhD research considered conceptions of ‘the global’, as a spatial-territorial versus an ‘orientational’ category, in post-millennium Anglophone Kenyan and Nigerian writing. It examined how writers present a range of character tactics for negotiating ‘the global’, from access, mobility, and the hijacking of resources (spatial) to fashioning one’s identity as a global subject (orientational). My current Leverhulme project looks at literary depictions of culture commodification: fictional characters seeking to commodify some aspect of cultural heritage, from ‘ethno-technologies’ to the conversion of heritage locations into tourist sites. Drawing on novels from Ghana, Southern Africa, Britain, and Ireland, the project considers how ideas about the novel as a uniquely ‘enclosing’ aesthetic form intersect with ideas of ‘a culture’ as closed, bounded and whole.
Publications
“‘Told in Conference Style’: Narrative Form and the Conceptualisation of ‘Culture’ in Woman of the Aeroplanes.” Forthcoming in ARIEL 56.1. (2025)
‘Cultural Enclosure and Literary Form’ special issue (editor). Forthcoming in Interventions 27.8. (2026)
'“Yahoo-Yahoos and Twitter kweens’: Internet Technologies in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 59. 5 (2023), pp.660-673.
Irony, Agency and the Global Imaginary in Contemporary Nigerian and Kenyan Literature (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025).
“Postcolonial Literature as World Literature”, co-authored with Madhu Krishnan, The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies, Routledge, ed. Neal Alexander and David Cooper (2025), pp. 61-70.
“World-Making and the Media: Foreign Correspondents and Other “Technologies” in the Work of Binyavanga Wainaina”, African Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury, ed. Madhu Krishnan and Alexander Fyfe (2021), pp. 213-232.
“Outside the Supermarkets: Global Consumer Culture in One Day I Will Write About This Place and Graceland”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 51.4 (2020), pp.197-215.