I research how writers interact with the institutions that make up modern and contemporary life - especially cultural, educational and publishing institutions. I am particularly interested in understanding the state as a cultural actor. I centre archival methodologies, literary and social difference in my research.
State Sponsored Literature
My PhD Officially Autonomous: Anglophone Literary Cultures and the State since 1945 examined how the post-WWII democracies gave economic protections to literature through a new generation of cultural institutions including the Arts Council, the British Council and Cold War-era cultural diplomacy. It was itself funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
My book State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020) is the first in-depth study of how the British state involved itself in the literary world for literature's sake. Addressing over 100 primary sources from 10 major public archives, State Sponsored Literature explored how changing literary publics after empire shaped the meanings and effects of state action.
It won the 2021 University English Book Prize. The judges said ‘the subject needs an approach which can encompass its labyrinthine, complex and contradictory impulses and expressions, and receives it here’. Please email me if you wish to access the book but cannot.
You can listen to me discuss it on the New Books Network podcast. The blog statesponsoredliterature.com makes publicly accessible some of the materials I used, including: databases of state literary gatekeepers, writer profiles, multimedia resources including a discussion of the book.
Matter of state
My next book project revisits central debates about the linguistic conditions of postcolonial literature, which tend to revolve around the moral and political legitimacy of writing in ex-colonial languages on the one hand, and how the state and market have acted as agents of linguistic imperialism on the other. I reframe how we think about these debates by taking a peopled approach to history. Four principal agents have made and remade literary craft across locations, language systems and material forms in the twentieth century: missionaries, publishers, educators, and writers themselves. In each case, the colonial and postcolonial state has been pivotal to each of these perspectives on literature, often to suprising effect. You can listen to me talk about this research in a lecture for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing: 'Linguistic imperialism' with book history in mind.
In 2025-26 I am on a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the project 'Eng. Lit. after Empire', which examines how a new generation of educators in Jamaica, Britain and Kenya worked to "decolonize the curriculum" during the historical period of decolonization and what we can learn from this today.
African literature and the CIA
I have published on the Africa-based activities and magazines of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1960s, and was an advisor for ‘Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club’ at the Chrysler Museum of Modern Arts.
Other activities
At Birmingham, I am director of the Contemporary Literature and Culture research group. In Spring 2025 we co-programmed the Stuart Hall Archive Project 'Readings' seminar at the Birmingham Race Impact Group Cafe, reading and listening to a selection of Stuart Hall’s unpublished lectures, interviews, and letters, and discussing his life and work and our own times. In 2019 I co-organized Stuart Hall's Archive: A Symposium to mark the arrival of Hall's archive at the University.
I co-curated the Uncovering Hidden Histories project at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts with students, colleagues and the poet Dzifa Benson - read our alternative museum labels here.
I am Director of Awards for the international book history association SHARP and an external examiner for the BA English at City, University of London.