BA (Oxford), CPE/ PGDip Law (City), MPhil, PhD (Cambridge), PGCert (Birmingham)

I completed my undergraduate degree at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. After a period away from academia, I returned in 2004 for an MPhil in Criticism and Culture at Pembroke College, Cambridge, followed by a PhD in English Studies. I spent a year at the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar in 2006-2007. Before joining Birmingham in 2013, I was the Junior Research Fellow in World Literatures of the 20th and 21st Centuries in English at Wolfson College, Oxford, and in January 2018 I was seconded to the University of Illinois at Chicago for two years as a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow.

Prior to beginning an extended period of research leave in 2016, I taught on the first-year undergraduate modules Poetry and Plays & Performance, and convened, or helped to convene, the second-year modules Tragedy and Colonial/ Postcolonial, and the third-year module Postcolonial Poetry and Poetics. I also taught on the MA modules Contemporary Literature and Theories of the Modern. 

I would be very happy to supervise dissertations on topics in postcolonial/ world literatures, especially those focused on anglophone novelists and poets from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. I would also be happy to supervise dissertations on British and American writers of mid- to late twentieth century, particularly if addressed from narratological and stylistic and/ or book historical perspectives. 

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

My first monograph, J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2015, traces the emergence and meaning of Coetzee’s spare, stark and sometimes lyrical prose, and situates his early and middle fictions in relation to works of South African, European and American predecessors and peers. My new research project, ‘Literary Communities and Literary Worlds’, examines several mid-twentieth-century authors, including Stefan Heym, Vladimir Nabokov, and Denise Levertov, who managed to gain entry to the American literary field by re-shaping their practices in response to their new literary environments. I am co-editor, with Ben Etherington, of The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (2018), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee (2019).

Since 2012 I have been involved in a larger collaborative research project, Crafts of World Literature, initiated by myself and Dr Ben Etherington (Western Sydney University, Australia). We have thus far staged three international conferences and colloquia (Crafts of World Literature, 2012; Poetic Craft and White Settler Colonialism, 2013; Craft Wars, 2014), and convened a panel at the MLA 2018 (Crafts of World Literature: Materials, Genres, Forms) and a stream of panels at ASAUK 2018 (African Literature: Communities, Collaborations, Crafts & Crossings). We have also produced special issues of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2014) and Wasafiri (2016).

Books and special issues

• Editor. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019)
• Editor, with Ben Etherington. The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
• J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)
• Editor with Ben Etherington and Rachel Bower. Crafts of World Literature, a Special Issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49.3 (2014) 

Journal articles

• ‘Guy Butler’s Poetry and Poetics: Beyond Postcolonialism & Prac. Crit.’. Wasafiri, 86 (2016) 58-64.
• With Ben Etherington. ‘Field, Material, Technique: On Renewing Postcolonial Literary Criticism’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 49.3 (2014) 279-298. 
• ‘Caring, Teaching, Knowing: Spivak, Coetzee and the Practice of Postcolonial Pedagogies’. Parallax, 17.3  (2011) 19-31.
•  ‘For Neither Love nor Money: The Place of Political Art in Pierre Bourdieu’s Literary Field’. Textual Practice, 23.4 (2009) 599-620.
• ‘Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing Context of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’. English Studies in Africa, 47.1 (2004) 47-59.

Book chapters

•  ‘Stories and Narration’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee, ed. Jarad Zimbler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019)
• ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee, ed. Jarad Zimbler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019)
• ‘Literary Worlds and Literary Fields’, in The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, eds. Jarad Zimbler and Ben Etherington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 69-84.
• With Ben Etherington. ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, eds. Jarad Zimbler and Ben Etherington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1-24.
• ‘Lyric Arrest: South African Poetry after Apartheid’, in Post-Conflict Literature: Human Rights, Peace, Justice, eds. Chris Andrews and Matt McGuire (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 96-106.
• ‘Mythology, Empire and Narrative’ in Late Victorian into Modern, 1880-1920: Oxford 21^st-Century Approaches to Literature, eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 38-54.
• ‘Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing Context of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’ in Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa, ed. Andrew van der Vlies (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), pp. 195-207.

Reviews and interviews

• Review of Keya Ganguly’s Cinema, Emergence and the Films of Satyajit Ray. New Formations 80/81 (2014) 226-229.
• ‘Interview with Josh Comaroff and Ong Ker Shing’. The Salon 6 (2013), http://jwtc.org.za/volume_6.htm
• Review of Archie L. Dick’s The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures. The Library (Transactions of the Bibliographic Society) 14.2 (2013) 228-229.
• Review of Jane Poyner’s J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. History of Intellectual Culture 9.1 (2010/2011).
• Review of Jean-Pierre Martin’s Bourdieu et la littérature. French Studies 65.4 (2011) 555-556.
• Review of Stefan Helgesson’s Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists and the Inequality of Print Culture. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 10.3 (2009) 364-366.