About

I work on identity and form in both contemporary literature and film, employing postcolonial, feminist, formalist, and cultural materialist methodologies. In recent years, I have been writing on censorship and the expression of trauma in literature and film. My research on censorship has resulted in a book on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship, The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Manchester University Press, 2020). This is the only film-by-film book to cover all Almodóvar’s 21 films and some of his experimental shorts. It argues that Almodóvar's work is a form of social critique, his films engaging with stereotypes about traditional and contemporary Spain to address Spain's traumatic historical past and how it informs the present. My focus is on social justice and human rights and I am particularly interested in issues around race, gender and migration. I analyse how culturally prescribed interpretive frameworks affect readings of contemporary literature by Black British, British Asian and migrant writers.  My first co-edited collection (with Patsy Stoneman and Angela Leighton), European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context (Peter Lang, 2005), explores the interdependence of English and continental European literatures in writing and films by women. My contribution to the collection tackles definitions of ‘Europe’ in a postcolonial world. This volume and another four edited collections were the outcomes of a British Academy funded network (1999–2004) for which I was assistant co-ordinator. My second edited collection, Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2014), revises the binary oppositions – identity-form, content-form and body-mind – through discussions of the role of the author, the ways in which writers embrace or bypass identity politics, and the function of identity and the body in literary form. My own essay considers what factors lead to writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro to be categorised as world writers and how this affects interpretations of their work. I am currently co-editing a collection of essays with Jonathan Ellis, Remembering Annie Hall (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022), my contribution to which will include an essay on the film’s intertextual relation to Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I am also planning a new project on Censorship in Global Literature.

Specialist areas of interest

Equality and diversity issues in contemporary British literature. 

Teaching

Department of Humanities

College of Social Sciences and Arts

I am currently assisting second year students in collaborating with Reading Sheffield, a community voluntary group. Students are writing their personal reading journeys and researching and writing blogs about popular early twentieth-century fiction.  Projects I am currently planning which will involve students are a Censorship Week and further collaborations with Reading Sheffield.   In the past, I have collaborated with Sheffield Central Library to organise an exhibition of final year students’ work on censorship. 

English, Department of Humanities

• BA English • BA English Literature • PhD

• Censorship, Conflict and Scandal • Contemporary Fiction • Ideas into Action • Literature Dissertation

Research

• Humanities Research Centre

• Remembering Annie Hall (co-edited collection with Dr J. Ellis, Bloomsbury, 2022)

• Censorship in Global Literature

• The role of perceived authorial identity in the reception of contemporary literature in Japan and the UK (with Professor Mitoko Hirabayashi, Nagoya University).

Voice 4Change UK Member of the Human Rights and Literature Network, run by the Human Rights Institute (Binghamton University, USA).

Member of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS).

Member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association (CWWA)

Founding member and co-organiser, multidisciplinary network Migration, Cultures and Communities. Participating universities: SHU, The University of Sheffield.

Member of the Northern Postcolonial Network. Human Rights Symposium organisation 2015.

Member of Multicultural Textualities, a research network established to explore the contribution that literary and other textual representations make to our understanding of multicultural societies and the place of non-white, non-secular citizens within them. Participating universities: Queen Mary, Sheffield Hallam, SOAS, Southampton, UEA, York.

Member of the Postcolonial Studies Association (Conference Committee 2014–15).

Founding member and assistant co-ordinator, British Academy funded network, European Intertexts: A Study of Women’s Writing in English as Part of a European Fabric.

Publications

Other activities

Member of the Advisory Board for the periodical of the Faculty of Arts, Sohag University, Egypt.

Postgraduate supervision

I welcome applications from research students interested in the fields of censorship, human rights and literature, contemporary literature, migrant writing, fiction and gender, trauma and literature, and identity and form. I am also happy to take on projects on Spanish cinema and the Spanish Civil War in film and literature. 

I have supervised or am currently supervising the following research projects:n

• With or Without Us: Cinematic Thinking and Cinematic Worlds

• Reading Trans: An Analysis of Post-1990s Trans Fiction

• Digesting "Creepypasta": An Analysis of Social Media Horror

• Rethinking Transcultural Relations in a Latin American Literary Context

• Overlayered Landscapes in Twenty-First Century Fiction of the American South

• All Hallows: A Study of Halloween Literature as a Sub-Genre of Horror

• Why are real-life British serial killers rarely represented on film?

• Abjection and the Body in Body-Horror Films

• Censoring Allegorical Texts: Interpreting Miller and Orwell'

• Print/Screen: How Contemporary Print Fiction Remediates Digital Writing