In January 2013, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) project that I co-direct with Dr Martin Eve was in its early stages of launching as an international network of academics, publishers and open source software developers. We were fortunate to receive a large amount of media coverage in the...

I'm delighted to be able to announce the launch of an open access project called the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). My colleague at Lincoln Dr Martin Paul Eve and I are the Academic Project Directors of this initiative, which will establish a journal and...

I've been invited to contribute an article to a special issue of the journal Paradoxa titled "African Science Fiction," edited by Dr Mark Bould. Having taught Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi (1984) for my 3rd year Science Fiction module recently (more module info here),...

In April 2013, my PhD student Chris Callow and I co-organised a conference dedicated to SF writer and academic Adam Roberts titled "New Genre Army: An International Conference on the Writing of Adam Roberts." The conference is part of the Gylphi "Contemporary Writers:...

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...

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...

On Friday 18th May I'll be joining the Guardian Higher Education Network for their weekly Live Chat blog. This week's discussion will be focused around "How to be a good lecturer" and I'll be posting as well as answering any questions. You can join the chat from 12:00 to...

In the Autumn semester of 2012 I'll be teaching on the University of Lincoln's core second-year module "Making it New: An Introduction to Literary Modernism." The module aims to enable students to read (and enjoy) modernist texts and to understand the differences...

On Wednesday 2nd May I was invited to join Siren FM's "Midweek Drive" evening show, joining presenter Alex Lewczuk. Guests included the documentary film-maker Phil Leirness, Sci-Fi London fillm festival director Louis Savy, X-Files actor Dean Haglund, and Hollywood writer...

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...

In June 2012 I launched an online journal of literary criticism called Alluvium. Martin Paul Eve is co-editing the journal with me, which publishes monthly articles on new directions in twenty-first century literature as well as twenty-first century critical approaches to the canon....

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...

Building on my research into British novelists Jeanette Winterson, Marina Warner, Doris Lessing, Maggie Gee and Ali Smith, in the Autumn semester of 2012 I will be contributing to the team-taught MA module on the University of Lincoln's MA in 21st Century Literature, "Women Writing...

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...

I've recently been involved in running the Capital Reading Group at the University of Lincoln, which meets every fortnight during term-time to read and discuss Marx's first volume of Das Kapital (in English – the Ben Fowkes translation). The group has a facebook page if...