Background

I have been teaching at the University of Birmingham since 1993. Prior to that I worked for three years at the University of East Anglia. I did my doctoral work in Canada at McGill University, where I held a Commonwealth Scholarship for five years. I took a BA in English (in the School of Cultural and Community Studies) at Sussex University.

Teaching

I have taught in a number of areas over the years: Victorian literature; Modernism; the Avant-gardes; Postmodern literature and theory; post-war British fiction; literary theory; and courses on specific writers (Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James). I currently teach a range of undergraduate modules and co-teach on the MPhil in Literary Transitions.

Research

My doctoral work focused on developments in the British novel after the Second World War, and this led to my first book, Postwar British Fiction (1995), which concentrated on the various responses to the legacy of Modernism and to the challenges posed by postmodernism. Since 1995 I have been working primarily on Modernist literature, although I have maintained my interest in contemporary writing, producing a book on J. G. Ballard (2005). Wyndham Lewis’s writing and painting is an ongoing source of interest; my book Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2004) discusses Lewis’s complex contribution to (and later critique of) Modernism. My principal interests at present coalesce around questions of history, tradition, and ethics from the late 19th to the late 20th century. I am also co-editor (with Deborah Parsons and Michael Valdez-Moses of the electronic journal Modernist Cultures, which focuses on the multiple contexts of modernity in order to consider issues of cultural production and circulation.

Conferences

I regularly contribute to conferences in England and abroad. Recent conferences that I have organised include:

• Literary Transactions (June 2000, Birmingham) explored the intersections between late nineteenth-century writing and early Modernism.
• Modernist Cultures (September 2003) was the annual Modernist Studies Association conference, which took place in Birmingham and was co-organised with Laura Marcus, Peter Nicholls, and Deborah Parsons.
• Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transitions (September 2006) was the biennial Ford Madox Ford Society conference.

Research groups

I am involved in the AHRC funded Modernist Magazines Research Project run by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker; I have contributed to the Modernist Journals Project at Brown University; I am working with Peter Brooker, Andrew Thacker and Deborah Parsons on the production of A Handbook of Modernisms; and I am engaged in collaborative research with Deborah Parsons on a project titled Imagining History: Literary Aesthetics, Modernity and Historiography 1873-1940.

Selected publications

• Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995).
• Wyndham Lewis (Northcote House/British Council, 2004).
• JG Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
• TE Hulme and the Question of Modernism eds. Andrzej Gasiorek and Edward J. Comentale (Ashgate, 2006).
• ‘Towards a Right Theory of Society’? Religion, Politics, and Machine Aesthetics’ in TE Hulme and the Question of Modernism, eds Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek (Ashgate, 2006).
• ‘Refugees from Time: Death’: History, Death and the Flight from Reality in Contemporary Writing’, in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005): 42-56.
• ‘The Politics of Antinomianism: Orwell, the Everyday, and the Dream of a Common Culture’ in George Orwell: A Centenary Celebration eds, Annette Gomis and Susana Onega (Universitatsverlag Winter: Heidelberg, 2005): 99-120.
• ‘“Architecture or Revolution”? Le Corbusier and Wyndham Lewis’ Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces eds, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005).
• ‘The Politics of Cultural Nostalgia: History and Tradition in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’ Literature and History, Special Issue Wartime Refractions (Autumn 2002) 11. 2: pp. 52-77.
• ‘”To Season with a Pinch of Romance”: Ethics and Politics in Lord Jim’ The Conradian (Special Issue on Conrad and Theory) ed. Andrew Gibson and Robert Hampson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998): pp. 75-112.