I joined the University of Bristol In September 2023 as Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Literature in the Department of English, where I convene or teach on the BA units American Literature 1945-Present, American Revolutions, Celebrity Cultures, Literature 1900-Present, and Representations: This Is (Not) My America, as well as the MA units Contemporary Literature and Literature 1940-1970: Writing After Modernism. My primary research interests are in Precarity Studies, American Studies, the Economic Humanities, and the Environmental Humanities. I have also published in Film Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Black Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Narrative Studies.

My current monograph project, Representing Precarity: American Literature and Culture from Boom to Crisis, tracks rising precarity and the representational challenge it poses in post-1945 American literature and film. Dividing the post-war era into two distinct periods, I thread Giovanni Arrighi’s analysis of the long twentieth century with Robert Brenner’s account of the economic shift in the 1970s from ‘long boom’ to ‘long downturn’. Drawing also on Fernand Braudel’s model of the longue durée, with its seasonal logic of hegemonic transition in the world-system, the project includes four chapters that correspond to the four ‘seasons’ of the American century: the spring of post-war American growth; the long, hot summer of urban rebellion; the autumnal chill of economic downturn; and the bitter winter of climate crisis. Reading across a range of media—the late industrial novel of the post-war boom, the experimental poetry of the counterculture, the documentary realism of post-industrial indie cinema, and the dystopian futures of contemporary climate fiction—Representing Precarity explores precarity’s theoretical explanation and critique; its representation in literature and film; and its role in the production of new subjectivities. 

In addition to my monograph, I am also at work on a second major research project. World-System Failure: Secular Stagnation and Post-2008 American Culture investigates cultural responses to what macro-economists call secular stagnation, a chronic condition of flagging economic growth that has afflicted the US economy since the 2008 financial crisis. It argues that secular stagnation underwrites a range of social issues—from rising inequality and frozen wages to housing shortages and precarious work—and poses significant challenges to decarbonization. Examining a range of responses to secular stagnation in novels, poetry, television, and film, it demonstrates how different narrative modes (the historicist, the investigative, the journalistic, and the apocalyptic) offer writers and filmmakers tools to explore the social, political, and environmental consequences of waning economic dynamism. Challenging dominant paradigms of infinite growth, World-System Failure insists that the transition to a post-growth society is already underway and will require a radical revaluation of our most basic values and desires: autonomy, mobility, freedom, and affluence.