Teaching

Teaching and scholarship

I teach at Birkbeck College, where I went back to university aged 31, studying part-time for an MA and a PhD. I’ve ended up as a part-time academic of over a decade’s standing, which was not something I planned for but which happened along the way. My PhD was a study of the idea of higher-dimensional space in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. It tracked how concepts are transformed in contact with distinct social and cultural groups, as ideas that were developed in theoretical geometry were adopted by occultists, popularisers, and literary writers, before forming a cornerstone of the emergent physics of relativity. Hyperdrives and infinity stones owe everything to this moment.

Supervised by Stephen Connor, I was inspired by Steve’s idea that the best work was a form of cultural phenomenology, trying to get inside cultural phenomena; my approach to the history of ideas was further informed by the theoretical writing of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. My PhD thesis became my monograph, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press, and it spawned a plethora of essays and conference papers. One of my essays, which used Joseph Frank’s seminal reading of spatial form in Modernism to read the Pulp Modernist works of weird fiction, was shortlisted for a prize: the SFRA Pioneer Award.

I love teaching and now have enough experience to actually be good at it. As in much else of my career, I’m a bit of a generalist. Because my research and writing have straddled periods and methods, I’ve taught across more programmes than is typical in the academy: at the latest count, MA Creative Writing, MA Cultural and Critical Studies, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature, MA Victorian Studies, BA Creative Writing, BA English Literature, and BA Arts and Humanities. I’m currently an external examiner at King’s College London for their BA English Literature programme, and have examined 3 PhDs.

I was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in the School of Law at Leeds and this helped a great deal in my understanding of how I could best help students with essay writing.

My Google Scholar citations are here, and my institutional page is here.