My principal research interests are in the areas of North American fiction, philosophy, and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell. My PhD was a comparative study of Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Thomas Kuhn, considering their work in relation to earlier forms of analytical philosophy.
My most recent publication is ‘Acknowledging a Numinous Ordinary’, a book chapter on Cavell and Marilynne Robinson in Marilynne Robinson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2022). This is part of a wider project on subjectivity, the ordinary, and humanism in Cavell, Robinson, and David Foster Wallace. I am currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Conversations: Journal of Cavellean Studies dedicated to the trans-disciplinary intellectual relationship between Stanley Cavell and Thomas Kuhn. My chapter on ‘Free Will’ is forthcoming in David Foster Wallace in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, in press).
Other publications on Cavell include an article on Cavell’s The World Viewed for the inaugural edition of the Journal of Contemporary Painting (2015), and a chapter on Cavell and George Santayana in the edited collection Stanley Cavell, Literature, and the Idea of America (Routledge, 2012). I am the co-author, with Andrew Dix and Brian Jarvis, of The American Novel in Context (Continuum, 2011).
Recent international conference participation includes papers on Cavell and Marilynne Robinson at the Stanley Cavell: A Retrospective conference (Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, 2021); the ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literary Studies’ strand of the American Comparative Literature Association 2021 conference; and the ‘God After God’ symposium (School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast, 2019).
Other international conference participation includes a paper on Cavell and David Foster Wallace at the David Foster Wallace Between Philosophy and Literature conference (Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara, 2018); on Cavell, Heidegger, and Derrida at the ACLA (Utrecht, 2017); and on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color at the Reading Animals conference (Sheffield, 2015).
I am co-lead of the Contemporary Research Group. I currently supervise PhD students working on Cormac McCarthy, Millennial Fiction, and Twenty-first Century Feminist Writing. I would welcome PhD projects focussing on or inspired by Stanley Cavell and ordinary language criticism.
I have expertise in fiction, philosophy, and critical theory and my teaching reflects this. At Part A, I convene the module Theory Matters: Critiquing Inequalities. At Part B, I convene the optional module Animal Tales: Non-human Animals in Literature, Philosophy, and Film., At Part C, I convene the module Global America. I am also involved in the Part C Dissertation module.