PhD Keele University
MA Keele University
BA University of East Anglia
I have worked at Loughborough University since 1991 except for a year (2002-03) on a faculty exchange at the University of Southern Mississippi.
My research focuses on contemporary American fiction, film and visual culture, crime and punishment, cultural geography and marxist critical theory. I would welcome PhD proposals in any of these areas. Recent publications and current projects include:
- Don DeLillo and the Visual [2021]
- 'The Rural Noir of Béla Tarr’ [2021]
- ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ in Gothic Handbook: Volume 1, Clive Bloom (ed.) (Palgrave: 2020)
- ‘David Lynch’ in Gothic Handbook: Volume 3, Clive Bloom (ed.) (Palgrave: 2019)
- ‘Universal Horror' in Gothic Handbook: Volume 3, Clive Bloom (ed.) (Palgrave: 2019)
- ’Stephen King’ in Gothic Handbook: Volume 3, Clive Bloom (ed.) (Palgrave: 2019)
- ‘Jayne Anne Phillip’ in Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context, Linda DeRoche (ed.) (ABC-CLIO: 2019)
- ‘You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend’: towards a rhythmanalysis of the everyday in the cinema of Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant’ in Journal of American Studies, 53.2 (2019)
- 'Inside The Circle: exploring the digital panopticon’ in Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, Antonia Mackay and Susan Flynn (eds.) (Palgrave: 2018)
- 'Matters of grave importance: style in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song’ in Death Sentences: Literature and State Killing, Birte Christ and Ève Morisi (eds.) (Legenda: 2018)
I teach on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules including:
- Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and American Culture
- Dissertation
- Global America
- Introduction to Film Studies
I am the School Director of Doctoral Programmes. Current PhD students and completions include:
- Mohammed Al-Obaidi: ‘Space in American Confessional Poetry’
- Emily Dickinson: ‘Violence in Contemporary American Women’s Fiction’
- Mabroka Elsanosi: ‘Religion in the Poetry of Robert Frost’
- Sarah Downes: ‘Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film’
- Oliver Haslam, ‘Minimalism in Contemporary American Fiction, 1970-2016'
- James Holden, ‘Intersections: Reading Science Fiction and Critical Thought’
- Lorna Piatti-Farnell: ‘Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction’
- Phil Smith, ‘Reading Art Spiegelman’
- Tosha Taylor: ‘Captivity in American Horror Film’
- Modernist Geographies section editor for Literature Compass.
- Editorial work and reader reports for: 49th Parallel, ABES, Comparative American Studies, Crime. Media. Culture, The Feminist Journal of criminology, History and Literature, The Journal of American Studies, Modern Language review, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Studies on Women Abstracts, Textual Practice, Theoretical Criminology, University Press of Mississippi.
- Research papers and lectures delivered at the David Bruce Centre (Keele University), Glasgow University, Leicester University, Manchester University, Nottingham University, Sheffield University, St Mary’s University College, Swansea University, University of Southern Mississippi etc.
- Member of the British Association of American Studies since 1990.
- External examiner for PhD theses at Lancaster, Liverpool, Nottingham and Staffordshire Universities.
- External examiner (UG and PG) at DeMontfort, Keele, Lancaster, Worcester and degree validations at Northampton and Nottingham Trent Universities.
- Peer review work for grant applications to the AHRC.
- Highly irregular blogger. E.g. ‘First Person’ for the Leicester Mercury (January 2016).