I am a writer, researcher, and feminist scholar. My research to date focuses on modern and contemporary avant-garde writing, with an emphasis on feminist writing and the politics of avant-garde textual practice. I am Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster. I am also a poet and am currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow.

My current monograph in progress explores the relationship between feminist avant-garde poetry, representation and social justice. The book addresses the relations between avant-garde feminist writing, political solidarity, and feminist activisms in the twenty-first century. A journal article related to this project, ‘Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil’, was recently published in the journal Contemporary Literature, and received an Honorable Mention in the L. S. Dembo Prize, 2024.

My work as a Series Editor of two book series for Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Foundations in Avant-Garde Writing and Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing (both co-edited with Eric White), seeks to redress the neglect of avant-garde writing, and to make the work of avant-garde writers, and scholarship on avant-garde writing, more widely available. I am the editor of a Critical Edition of Harryette Mullen’s work, Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and I also acted as editor for Lyn Hejinian volume of early poetry, Lyn Hejinian, The Proposition: Uncollected Early Poetry, 1963-1983 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

My feminist scholarship focuses on social violence against women. In 2018 I was awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant for the project Feminist Representations: Violence Against Women, Asylum, Voice and Testimony. The project aims to explore the contributions the arts and humanities may make to address institutional failures in the area of sexual violence against women and girls, with a specific focus on asylum, translation, voice and testimony. The project yielded a collection, Feminist Representations: Violence Against Women, Asylum, Voice and Testimony, which is currently in progress. More details of this project and my other projects can be found under the Funded Research Projects section of this site. A edited collection emerged from the project, Representing Violence Against Women: Asylum, Voice and Testimony, forthcoming in the Proceedings of the British Academy Series.

I am the UK Partner on the Growing Up Across Borders Project (GRABS) led by Professor Jane Freedman, funded by the ERC. This project aims to bring greater understanding of the experiences of young people who are “growing up” whilst crossing borders in situations of forced migration and mobility. I am organising a series of workshops for the project with young people growing up across borders, involving artists, writers, photographers, and filmmakers.

All of my work is located at the intersection of writing, visual art, and film. My book, Kathy Acker: Writing the Impossible (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) offered the first in-depth study of Kathy Acker’s work through original archival research. It claims that Acker’s body of work is one of the most significant collections of avant-garde writing in English. Tracing the stages in Acker’s compositional processes through close scrutiny of Acker’s unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, essays, illustrations, and correspondence, the book argues that Acker continued a modernist engagement with the crisis of language. It reveals that Acker carried out a series of experiments in composition that are comparable in scope and rigour to her modernist predecessors, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.

Walk into bookshops, browse library shelves, you will find few books on avant-garde writing. Reading Experimental Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) is a collection designed to address this gap by bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment. The book takes up the politically charged question of ‘reading’ in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Stemming from my research on avant-garde writing, I have a particular interest in the publishing practices and literary politics of small presses. With Leigh Wilson I have worked on The Contemporary Small Press project since 2013. In 2020 we published a collection that gathered the most exciting research on the Small Press today, The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

From 2022-2023 I was a Senior Research Associate on the Mellon Foundation project ‘New Ways of Collecting, Collaborating and Curating: Towards a Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive’, led by Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod and Justine Mann at the University of East Anglia.

Biography

I was born in East Anglia, in Bungay. I carry the misty air, coastal walks with my mother, and the setting sun over the Waveney Valley in my heart. I read English at Royal Holloway, University of London. I continued my studies at Royal Holloway with a Masters in Modern and Contemporary Literature. After a few years living in London, writing and reviewing for art and literary magazines, I returned to Royal Holloway to immerse myself in avant-garde writing and critical theory for my doctorate, which I completed in 2007.

I taught as a Visiting Lecturer in English and Philosophy at Royal Holloway. I also taught a course in Photography at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, which allowed me to indulge my passion for Visual Art and Photography. In 2011 I joined the University of Westminster as a Lecturer in English. In 2016, I became a Senior Lecturer, and in 2021 I became a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature.

After twenty years of living and writing in London, a city I love deeply, the skies pulled me back to the East. I now live in Cambridge.