I came to Manchester in 2000, having previously held lectureships at the University of Kent (where I was a postgraduate) and Birkbeck, University of London.

The information on this system of doctoral theses supervised is very incomplete - see instead below under 'Opportunities' for a list of the doctoral students I have supervised.

Research

I am the General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E.M. Forster in eight volumes.

My critical writing has three broad themes which often appear in combination: modernism, colonialism and the post-colonial; the arts and English radicalism; and masculinity and male sexual identity. 

D.H. Lawrence

I am currently working on a book on Lawrence and politics.

I’ve written some twenty articles and chapters on Lawrence. I am on the editorial board of the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies and the reading committee for Etudes Lawrenciennes. New D.H. Lawrence (Manchester UP, 2009), which I edited, utilised current and new approaches in English Studies. 

Recent work includes a chapter on Lawrence and Swinburne in Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019); a piece on Lawrence, politics and art in D.H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh UP, 2020); and an article on Lawrence, mourning and creativity in the Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies (2022). 

E.M. Forster

In addition to my work on the CUP edition for Forster’s fiction, for which I am editing Maurice, I have written a number of chapters and articles that address his work. These include the chapter on Maurice in The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster (Cambridge UP, 2007), a chapter on Maurice and David Galgut’s Forster biofiction Arctic Summer in a volume of essays on Maurice edited by Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (Liverpool UP, 2020), and an article on Forster in The Cambridge Quarterly (2021).

Modernism and colonialism

Modernism and Empire, edited with Nigel Rigby (Manchester UP, 2000) helped pioneer this field. With Robert Spencer and Anastasia Valassopoulos, I am currently writing British Writing from Empire to Brexit which is contracted to Routledge.

Authors I've addressed under this heading - in addition to Forster, Lawrence and Kipling - include Claude McKay, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Robert Byron. 

Rudyard Kipling

My work on Rudyard Kipling includes editing The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (CUP, 2011). I am on the reviewing board for The Kipling Journal, and I was a plenary speaker at the ‘Kipling in Europe’ conference in Bologna in September 2016.

John Addington Symonds

I have authored articles and chapters on Victorian cultural critic and pioneering writer on sexuality, John Addington Symonds. For example, I was a plenary speaker at the ‘(Re)reading Symonds’ conference at Keele University in September 2010, which was subsequently published in English Studies in 2013.

See 'overview'.

I welcome enquiries about PhD supervision in the areas in which I work. The following is a list of current and past supervisees:

Completed: Aimillia Rohd Mamli, North Africa in Victorian writing; Andrew Frayn, fiction about the First World War; Burcu Alkan (with Terry Eagleton), Turkish Literature of the 1970s; Letizia Alterno, Raja Rao (with Anastasia Valassopoulos); Creina Mansfield (Creative Writing PhD, with Ian McGuire), Graham Greene and The Quiet American; Ian Pople (creative Writing PhD, with John McAuliffe), Roy Fisher and mysticism; Jade Munslow Ong, Olive Schreiner and the Modern; Matt Whittle, responses to mass immigration in post-war British writing; Gemma Moss, modernism and music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner; Susan Kinnear, New Zealand literature and modernity; Lucy Burns, Black Mountain College, poetry and the teaching of Creative Writing (with John McAuliffe); Laura Ryan, Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (with Douglas Field); and Jo Jones, Lawrence, France and bisexuality (with Jerome Brillaud). In progress: Fay Winfield, on postcolonial approaches to TV adaptation (with Anastasia Valassopoulos); Emma Shaw, on modernism and walking (with Daniela Caselli); Billy Kahora, creative writing (with Ian McGuire and Kamila Shamsie); Ziling Bai on Chinese translations of Virginia Woolf (with Anna Strowe in Translation Studies); Seerat Fatima (with Anastasia Valassopoulos), affect and the Partition of India in 1947; Thameena Alam (with Sundhya Walther) on utopian South Asian writing and experience; and Xinyi Xu (with Noelle Duckmann-Gallagher) on illness and the postcolonial in British and Chinese modernist writing.