Leeds Trinity University College

Faculty Member, English

About

I am a Visiting Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University College. I have taught previously at the Universities of York and East Anglia and I completed my PhD on the fiction of Ford Madox Ford at York in 2008.

I am the co-organiser of 'Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: Modernism and the First World War', an international conference to be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, from the 27-29 September 2012. Speakers at the conference will be invited to submit papers for publication in International Ford Madox Ford Studies vol. 13, which will be published in 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. For more information please visit: http://fordmadoxford-conference.weebly.com.

My research is founded on interests in modern and contemporary fiction, modernity and narrative theory. My first monograph, "Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War", will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2012. Ford is a major modernist writer, yet many of his works do not conform to our assumptions about modernism. Examining the ways in which Ford, alongside other 'misfit moderns' (Richard Aldington, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, H. G. Wells, and Rebecca West), undermines various 'stabilities' we usually expect from novels and memoirs, my book offers original readings of Ford's Edwardian fiction and First World War writing, and poses wide-ranging questions about the nature of narrative and the distinction between modernism and modernity. See http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=510321 for further details.

I am also working on "Ford, Fitzgerald and the Great Crash", an essay that marks the stepping-off point for my next book-project, provisionally entitled "Trusting Texts: Fiction and Finance, 1890-1990". This work will focus on the issues of trust and finance from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, seeking to make interdisciplinary connections between literature, economics, sociology and politics, and examining works by British and American writers from George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, H. G. Wells and Jean Rhys to John Dos Passos, Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter and Martin Amis. In addition to these publications, I am working with Ashley Chantler of the University of Chester on an edited collection entitled "Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction". The volume will include essays by fourteen experts on Ford, modernism, the First World War and twentieth-century literature and culture, including Andrzej Gasiorek (Birmingham), Sara Haslam (Open University), Max Saunders (King's College London) and Martin Stannard (Leicester).

I have particular teaching interests in twentieth-century literature, modern and contemporary British and American fiction, war writing, and narrative theory, and I have taught widely on the literature, culture and critical theory of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Contact Information