Film Studies

I joined Keele in 2009 having studied at the universities of Cambridge (BA), London (MA), and Leeds (PhD). My teaching interests and experiences are wide ranging, and I contribute to a number of undergraduate English and Film modules, including Reading Literature, Becoming a Critic, Twentieth-Century Novels into Films, Post-War British Fiction and Poetry, The Two Cultures of the Arts and the Sciences, and Postcolonial and World Literature. I also teach on the Humanities MRes and the MA in Global Media and Culture, and would be very happy to supervise research students working in any area of postcolonial or environmental studies.

My research focuses on postcolonial literatures and cultures, looking especially at issues such as globalisation, economic development, and environmental change. My book Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (Routledge, 2011) examines writings from islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean in relation to interdisciplinary tourism studies, showing how imaginative texts provide strategies for negotiating exploitative travel practices. My current research project on Postcolonial Literature and Disaster addresses the social and environmental dimensions of a number of post-WWII crises, exploring how postcolonial aesthetics can enhance disaster management and sustainability planning. In each case, my work seeks to engage with a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and build on the exciting research currently taking place at the intersection between postcolonialism and ecocriticism. From January–June 2012 I will be a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich.