I am an academic and practitioner specialising in Applied Theatre, Actor Training, Creative Writing, Theatre-in-the-Round, Early Modern Drama, Theatre and Phenomenology and Creative Industries Employability pedagogy

My PhD research explored the social history of mass resettlement into one of South Africa's Bantustans, the Ciskei. It examined the variety of experiences that relocation engendered, the modes of survival that these upheavals necessitated and the political effects that this process had in bolstering the local power of Bantustan elites. This research will be published in my forthcoming monograph. I am interested in bringing some of the insights of this research to bear in contemporary and comparative contexts. I have done research on some of the more recent off-farm settlements produced as a result of farm evictions in post-apartheid South Africa.

Historical research underpins new plans to commemorate nineteenth-century feminists

I joined Sheffield Hallam in October 2010 after having been a temporary lecturer in France, at the University of Grenoble (2004-2006), a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of York (2006-2008) and a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Coventry (2008-2010).

My research specialisms are stylistics (including cognitive poetics), narratology (including possible worlds theory), and digital fiction. My teaching reflects my research interests and I teach on a range of modules and supervise postgraduate students across the English programme

I am a Fellow of the English Association, and President of the Robert Graves Society. My role at Sheffield Hallam University is Deputy Head and Head of Academic Development in the Department of Humanities.

Play enables discussion of issues that can lead to extremism by touring British schools