About
I am a twentieth-century and contemporary literary and cultural studies scholar based in Brighton and Coventry (UK).
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.
I have a particular interest in the politics and representation of housework, the history and representation of domestic technology, post-1945 US literature, and the place of mid-century culture in the public imagination. My work is informed by my previous career in market research and advertising.
I am the founder of the International Literary Waste Studies Network, which brings together scholars working on waste in literature across genres, forms, historical periods, and geographic regions. I am also the chair of British Association for American Studies' Publications and Knowledge Exchange Executive Sub-Committee, and I sit on the editorial board of the journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-Horror and the Eco-Gothic.
Having grown up between the US and Italy, and having now lived in the UK for twenty years, I am especially interested in the social construction of national identity, and the objects we use to communicate it.
You can find recent work of mine here, here, and here.
You can find my upcoming and recent talks, podcasts, and keynotes here.
My new book on time-saving appliances and domesticity in post-45 US lit came out in hardback on 4 November 2021!
Upcoming and recent
interviews, keynotes, and talks
“[E]ndowed the Picture of a Refrigerator with Heavenly Bliss”:
Appliances & Utopian Possibility
in Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes
Conference paper
British Association for Modernist Studies Conference: Hopeful Modernisms
Bristol
June 2022
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Projects
Cleaning Through Crisis: Political Upheaval and the Advertising of Domestic Hygiene, 1963-2023 (in progress)
This British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project examines the influence of moments of socio-political unrest (including but not limited to the environmental movement of the 1960s, the economic crises of the 1970s, the 1980s AIDS crisis, and the 2007-2009 global financial crisis) on the depiction of domestic cleaning in British and American popular culture. I am analysing hundreds if not thousands of cleaning product ads produced in this period to understand how commercial representations of the "clean home" changed in response to, and in turn influenced, specific anxieties and fears.
Education
September 2011 - September 2015
PhD UCL
September 2009 - September 2011
MA King's College London
September 2000 - July 2005