RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research explores the connection between music and the idea of "spirit" in modern and contemporary literature, especially in Beckett. I am currently preparing a monograph on the topic, entitled: More Nearly Pure Spirit: Beckett, Music and Spirituality . My wider research interests include performance poetry, narrative theory, and contemporary politics in literature.

PUBLICATIONS

1. "Spirit Into Sound: Samuel Beckett's Phenomenology of Music". Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. Routledge, in progress.
2. Beckett and Politics. Co-edited with William Davies. Palgrave, 2020 (forthcoming).
3. "'Too clumsily explicit': Beckett's excised celestial music". Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, . Edited by James Little, Georgina Nugent-Folen, Emilie Morin and Mark Nixon. 2019.
4. "Two Poetries?: a re-examination of the poetry divide in 1970s Britain". The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Edited by Peter Robinson. Oxford University Press, 2013. 
5. "Bernard Spencer and Lawrence Durrell: Island Influences". Edited by Peter Robinson. Shearsman Books, 2012.

TALKS

I have delivered papers and talks on Beckett at international conferences and seminars, including Dublin, London, Antwerp, San Diego, Nottingham, Reading, Bergen and Oxford. I have also co-organised two international conferences in Reading: the "Beckett & Europe" Postgraduate and Early Careers conference (2015) and the "Beckett and Politics" conference (2016).

1. "The Margins of a Discourse: Jazz Poetry, Music and the ‘Space Between’". Music and Literature: Innovations, Intersections and Interpretations Conference, Edinburgh Napier University, June 2018.
2. "The Political Turn in Beckett Studies and Beyond". Co-presented with William Davies. Historicizing Modernism Conference, University of York, May 2018.
3. "Milton, Maths and Music: Beckett’s Harmony of Numbers". Modernism and Maths Conference, University of Manchester, May 2018.
4. "(En)gendering Spirit: Beckett's Eve/Mary Sirens". Beckett and Politics Conference, University of Reading, November 2016.
5. "'Too clumsily explicit': Beckett's excised celestial music". DRAFF Conference, Trinity College Dublin, August 2016.
6. “‘A whisper of that final music’ in Beckett’s Worstward Ho”. Samuel Beckett: Performance / Art / Writing Conference, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2016.
   
7. “'Unheard of musical relations': Beckett’s Modernist aesthetics of sex". Beckett and Modernism Conference, Antwerp, 2016.
   
8. “‘music Music MUSIC’: Carnal Frivolity and the Censor in Beckett’s Early Works”. Beckett and Vice International Conference, San Diego, 2016.
9. “Better Abort: Rhythmic Totality and an Aesthetics of Spirit in Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho”. Modernist Musics and Political Aesthetics Conference, University of Nottingham, 2015.
10. “Ex(or)cised Angels: Unheard Music and Suppressed Spirituality in Beckett's Watt”. Beckett International Foundation Annual Research Seminar, University of Reading, 2014.
11. “‘Damning the life of the body on earth’: Samuel Beckett's Proustian music”. Modernism, Christianity, and Apocalypse Conference, University of Bergen, 2012.
12. “‘Plane of white music’: Samuel Beckett's ethereal sounds”. Debts and Legacies Postgraduate Symposium, University of Oxford, 2012.
13. “Bernard Spencer and Lawrence Durrell”. Bernard Spencer Centenary Conference, University of Reading, 2009.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

As part of a widening participation initiative with a charity, I teach university-style courses on music and literature to school pupils from disadvantaged and low-participation schools across the Midlands. I am also a tutor for an Access to HE course in the Midlands.