I am a twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and cultural studies scholar. My research spans gender and sexuality studies, waste studies, domestic space studies, nostalgia studies, and advertising history, and is invested in examining the intersections between different forms, media, and politico-commercial imperatives. These interests are informed by my prior career in advertising and market insight consulting. My research has yielded two monographs. The first, Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (2016), examined the role of waste in literary critiques of capitalist commodity culture by Anglo-European and US writers influenced by Surrealist visual art. The second, “All-Electric Narratives”: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020 (2021), examined how US writers across genres and of different political persuasions have engaged with the shifting gendered and racialised meanings ascribed to appliances over the last 75 years by manufacturers, politicians, and advertisers, and their broader international influence. It won the Popular Culture Association’s 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women’s Studies. I am currently working on a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project, Cleaning through Crisis: Socio-Political Upheaval and the Advertising of the Clean Home: 1963-2023, as well as a longer-term crossover book provisionally titled Postmillennial Nostalgia: Mid-Century Modern and the Politics of Longing.

I am also the founder of the International Literary Waste Studies Network, which I set up in 2019 to enable collaboration between scholars committed to investigating cultural conceptualisations of waste, value, and marginalisation across periods, genres, and national traditions. I am currently editing our first essay collection, Queer Trash and Feminist Excretions: New Directions in Literary and Cultural Waste Studies (SUNY Press, 2024). The essays in the collection engage with queer and feminist literary and artistic reappropriations of waste, and of practices long devalued due to their association with domestic work (e.g. crafts, mending, quilting), to challenge systemic forms of oppression, celebrate queer and female identities, and imagine more equitable and sustainable futures. 

I have spoken about my work on BBCRadio3 Free Thinking (“Housework”  and “Midcentury Modern”) and podcasts including The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1910-1945 (here), The Gravy (here), Papers on Language and Literature (here), and the Swiss newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (print only). You can find out more about my work on my personal website and blog.

I welcome PhD students working on waste, twentieth-century and contemporary US literature, gender, sexuality, consumer culture, advertising and/or domesticity.