Research

My background is in comparative literary studies, but my work is interdisciplinary. My book Reading Frictions: Memory, Violence and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary World Literature discusses how and whether contemporary writers’ engagements with ‘touch’ can generate new possibilities for representing violent, intertwined histories of modern violence, as well as for reimagining ethical forms of collectivity and relation in the present. Focusing on writers including Katja Petrowskaja, Teju Cole, Han Kang, and Claudia Rankine, the book explores topics including the limitations of empathy; the possibilities for speculative and ‘subjunctive’ thinking; the use of multimodality; and the relationship between writing and anti-colonial resistance.

I co-edited a special issue of parallax ‘Reading Otherwise’ with Dr Ruth Daly. The issue considered the meanings and possibilities of decolonial feminisms today; how they shape, and are shaped by, practices of reading – but also writing, speaking and living – ‘otherwise’ in academia and beyond.

It features a series of conversations between writers and thinkers, including Lisa Lowe and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay; Jacqueline Rose and Lyndsey Stonebridge; Danai S. Mupotsa and Mbali Mazibuko; Patricia Domínguez and Victoria Vargas-Downing; Jodi Byrd and Eve Tuck; and Christina Sharpe, Françoise Vergès and K’eguro Macharia.

I have also written on a number of other topics, including techno-touch in Afrofuturist film (The Senses & Society), ‘subjunctive’ remembering (Berghahn Books); Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Journal of Postcolonial Writing) and the ethics of curation and the future of the museum (Women’s History Review).

My PhD was at the University of Leeds (funded by WRoCAH), and before that, I studied at UCL (MA Comparative Literature, funded by the Provost’s Studentship) and at the University of Oxford (BA English and German).