I've been invited to give a public lecture as part of Durham University Palace Green Library's Exhibition on "Time Machines: The Past, the Future, and How Stories Take Us There" on Wednesday 7th June 2017. My talk will be titled "Utopia in Dark Times" (see here for...

As part of BBC Radio 4's Mars Season in March 2017, I was invited onto Woman's Hour for a live broadcast about "Women on Mars." Having featured in the documentary "A New Red World" produced by Mark Burman and presented by Ken Hollings, I was really thrilled to...

I was delighted to be involved in the making of a documentary for BBC Radio 4 on the subject of Martian utopias. Broadcast in March 2017 as part of Radio 4's Mars Season, the documentary — titled "A New Red World" — featured several clips in which I discussed how the...

I've been writing about Russian utopian science fiction over the past couple of months, so when I was invited to give a research lecture at the University of Salford in October 2016 I jumped at the chance to present some of this material. Although I'd love to develop this...

As part of the Museum of London's new Night Museum series, I'll be giving a talk titled "Dark City: London After the Apocalypse" for the Museum of Dark Places events, curated by Jes Fernie. My talk will consider London’s darker side in literary and popular...

I'm looking forward to the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF) 2016 conference later on in June. This year I've been asked to deliver one of two keynote addresses, along with Dr Patricia Wheeler (University of Hertfordshire). I've taken the opportunity to revisit my...

I'm delighted to have been invited onto the editorial board for the book series "Palgrave Studies in Utopianism." Utopianism is an interdisciplinary concept which explores both imagined ideal societies and practical attempts to create them, as interpreted through...

Having organised a panel on petrocultures as part of Birkbeck's Arts Week last year, "Environmental Futures: Oil, Ecology, Petrocultures," I'm delighted to be working with Dr Graeme Macdonald (University of Warwick) in co-editing a special issue of the Open Library of...

I'm delighted to announce that China Miéville: Critical Essays is now published. I've been co-editing this collection since Autumn 2012, after the successful Weird Council conference which saw academics from all over the world meeting to discuss Miéville's...

Since organising the panel "Environmental Futures: Oil, Ecology, Petrocultures" as part of Birkbeck's Arts Week programme in May 2015, I've been working up an article on critical engagements with peak oil in popular cultural texts – from films and TV to...

I've been invited this Autumn to deliver a lecture as part of a new series, "King's Fantastic Talks," organised by Dr Rhys Williams. My lecture will take place on 29th October at King's College London's campus and is titled "What's New About the Novum? SF,...

Since we organised a conference dedicated to British novelist Maggie Gee's writing in 2012, Dr Sarah Dillon (University of Cambridge) and I have been co-editing a book of scholarly essays examining her novels and short stories. Maggie Gee: Critical Essays is published by Gylphi...

The annual conference of the European Utopian Studies Society took place this year at the University of Newcastle. Taking its theme as "The End of the City," the 2015 conference was dedicated to examining the function of the city in contemporary utopian thought. As Yevgeny...

As part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2015 (see video about this below), I'm organising a panel titled "Environmental Futures: Oil, Ecology, Petrocultures" on Monday 18th May 2015, 2-5pm. Birkbeck Arts Week 2015 from The Derek Jarman Lab on Vimeo. Oil shapes our geopolitics...

I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to the US in Autumn 2011 to attend a fantastic conference, "Critical Refusals: The 4th Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society," held at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2011. Whilst this was the biennial...

I've been developing a new literary methodology for analysing twenty-first century British fictions over the course of the past 5 years, and one of my preoccupations is the way in which time functions in many novels: not only in terms of an increasingly self-relflexive temporal...

On 14th-15th September 2012 Tony Venezia and I co-organised a 2-day academic conference dedicated to the writing of China Miéville, called "Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville." The conference was...

I recently worked with Dr Sarah Dillon from the University of St Andrews and Anthony Levings, the Managing Editor of the arts and humanities publisher Gylphi, to organise a two-day international conference dedicated to the work of British novelist Maggie Gee. The conference brought...

Having worked extensively on the thinking of Ernst Bloch in my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the Twenty-First Century British Novel, I was keen to research Bloch's own literary criticism in more detail. In April 2010 I was able to start mapping out some of the key...