• BA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• MA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• DPhil English Literature (University of Oxford)

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

I arrived at Birmingham in 2016 following a temporary lectureship at QMUL. Prior to that I wrote a doctoral thesis on the phenomenon of state literary sponsorship at Oxford, and studied for a BA and MA in Sheffield before that. Outside of academic life I have worked in community development, activism and the arts, and interfaith work. I’m a South Londoner with family roots in Ireland, Kenya, and north India.

I convene the following modules in 2017-18:

• Colonial/Postcolonial
• New World Orders? Literature after 1945
• Dissertation/Extended Essay in English Literature

 I will be contributing to:

• Plays and Performance
• Prose
• Twenty-First Century Literature
• Contemporary Literature (MA)

I would be interested in hearing from individuals with proposals related to my research interests. I currently co-supervise projects on Anglophone travel writing on Central Africa and the economic conditions of South Asian literature.

---

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My AHRC-funded thesis examined how the modern state intervened to support literary culture after 1945, thereby becoming an integral, though conflicted, guardian of literary autonomy in the postcolonial world. This research has contributed to the monograph State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945, which examines the changing justifications for state literary support in Britain. Across six chapters on British Council, the Arts Council, the Rushdie Affair, the GCSE curriculum and the UK Committee for UNESCO, I argue that beliefs about who constituted literature’s ‘public’ were radically challenged by the unrivalled migration to Britain at the end of Empire.

Methodologically, my research emphasises the archive-based study of literary and cultural institutions, cultural policy, and organizations as definitive forces in literary history. Future research projects will address how democratic liberalism has shaped literary culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My abiding interest is in the global histories of texts and their multivalent uses.

I have presented my research at conferences in the UK and internationally. In recent years this has included presentations on black British writing and the Arts Council at the University of Stockholm (‘Presumed Autonomy: Literature and the Arts in Theory and Practice’), on Amnesty International and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s support for Transition magazine in Uganda (‘Writers, Rights, Institutions’, University of Oxford), and on state literary subsidy in relation to the value of literary studies (‘English: Shared Futures’). 

I am a committee member of the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture.

Recent events I’ve curated for the Centre include Nikesh Shukla: In Conversation and ‘Burdens of Representation? Contemporary theatre by minority artists in Britain’