I've been invited to give a keynote talk at King's College London on Thursday 4th September 2014, as part of a training event for AHRC-funded PhD students at the London School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London, and King's College London. The event is...

In August 2014, I was invited to give a workshop on "Utopian Theory & Practice" for the SF/F Now conference at the University of Warwick with Dr Lisa Garforth (Newcastle University). SF/F Now was held as a 2-day international conference exploring the...

It's almost 2 years since I founded the open access journal Alluvium, which publishes short, topical articles written by leading academics on 21-century writing and 21st-century literary criticism. Launched in June 2012 with my colleague Dr Martin Eve, the journal has gone from strength...

In my capacity as Co-Director for the Open Library of Humanities publishing project I was asked to give several talks around Open Access Week 2013. These included the following: "Non-traditional research outputs" (invited lecture as part of a workshop on intellectual property), 12th...

I was recently invited to give a talk as part of a panel on "Promising Business Models" at the Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences conference, with my colleague and Co-Director of the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) Dr Martin Paul Eve. The OLH is...

On Thursday 27th June 2013, I was invited to deliver a guest lecture at Harvard University with my colleague Dr Martin Paul Eve (with whom I direct the Open Library of Humanities). The lecture was co-sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Mahindra...

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...

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...

I've been invited as a plenary speaker to the forthcoming conference "Will Self and the Art of the Contemporary," to be held at the University of Roehampton on Saturday 1st December 2012. See here for the call for papers. After an invigorating MA class on Will Self's The...

In July 2012 I delivered a paper on Hari Kunzru's latest novel Gods Without Men (Penguin, 2011) at the University of Lincoln's 'What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English" organised by Dr Siân Adiseshiah and Dr Rupert Hildyard. My paper, "Towards a...

One of the chapters of my monograph, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the 21st Century British Novel, explores the genre of post-apocalypse through a reading of Ernst Bloch's philosophy of "natural historical time." Many critics have commented upon the wave of SF and...

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...

I've spent the last 6 years researching theories of utopianism and their literary counterparts so am delighted to be teaching on the University of Lincoln's MA optional module "Writing Utopia and Dystopia" this year. The module starts with Thomas More’s...

I'm currently finishing my first monograph, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time and the Contemporary British Novel. The book interrogates representations of time within the late twentieth- and early-twenty-first century British novel. Central to this study is the assertion that...

Whilst working at the University of Surrey, I designed a third-year optional module on "The Twenty-First Century British Novel." The module offers students the opportunity to explore the British novel and its formal and thematic developments from 2000 to the present day –...

In September 2009 I delivered a conference paper at the David Mitchell conference organised by Dr Sarah Dillon and sponsored by the arts and humanities publisher Gylphi. The conference was an incredible experience and launched a series of conferences dedicated to living writers, in which the...

In September 2009 I was invited to deliver a paper at the annual Workshops in Political Theory held at Manchester Metropolitan University. My paper explored the "inner-space fiction" of Doris Lessing through the conceptual framework of the philosophy of solidarity (as developed by...

Having worked on Jim Crace's fiction as part of my PhD research, Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the 21st Century British Novel, I was keen to meet the critically-acclaimed novelist and Jim kindly agreed to let me interview him at his house in Birmingham. Between numerous cups of tea I...

In July 2009 I presented some of my work on Jacques Derrida's influential Sepcters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge, 1994) at the 10th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society, held at the Unviersity of Porto in...