My scholarly work revolves around the relation between aesthetics and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on modern and contemporary Anglophone literature.  

My research and teaching are thoroughly intertwined, combining my expertise in modern and contemporary literature with wider interests in politics and philosophy. My current project seeks to investigate the media contexts and socio-political formations of a post-literary culture. By bringing to bear an interdisciplinary skillset – historical contextualization, formal analysis, conceptual abstraction – this project aims to explore the crisis of literary readership across three vectors: the rise of AI and digital culture, the genre turn of contemporary fiction, and the political backdrop of an increasingly post-liberal world order. This project aims to address these questions: what has the changing status of the public sphere, in our digital age, meant for the practice of contemporary novelists and readers? How does media fragmentation map onto political processes of polarization? How might we perceive contemporary novels (especially experimental forms such as autofictions and theory fiction) as resistant to both neoliberal and populist attacks on democracy? 

This project builds on previous publications that address issues such as Trumpism, universalisms and the public sphere, Brexit and literature, the climate crisis and cli-fi, experimentalism in contemporary American literature, feminist writing and autofiction/autotheory, and literatures of the global anglosphere. My first book, 'The Politics of Life: J.M. Coetzee and Late Modernism', draws on the context of the material turn in the humanities to document the way in which Nobel-winning South African author, J.M. Coetzee, performs a decolonial critique in his writing that operates through a radical – and modernist-inspired – disruption of the liberal foundations of the Western novel. This work derives from my doctoral research and demonstrates my continued interest in the influence of modernist aesthetics on contemporary literature (especially those of Samuel Beckett). All of my work is inspired by a commitment to the idea that literature affords us the possibility of imagining alternative modes of being that challenge liberal forms of reasoning (including the discourse of rights; of the private individual; and of the national citizen) without succumbing to illiberalism or essentialism. 

Before starting my employment at the UvA I completed my PhD on Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. I have extensive teaching experience in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, and have previously taught at the University of London, the University of Bonn, and the University of Düsseldorf.

Alongside academic journals and publications, my work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, LA Review of Books and openDemocracy, and I am a contributing editor at Review 31 and a co-convenor of the ASCA reading group on “Aesthetics and Politics in Critical Theory” (now "Capitalism 2.0: Political Economy in Contemporary Critical Theory"). I am a member of the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (in the UK).

I also occasionally teach literary and cultural theory at Amsterdam University College. At the UvA I have taught/will be teaching academic and creative writing, literary theory, texts in focus courses, and multiple courses (both core and elective) on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature across the BA and MA programmes.