I am interested in modernism and modernist writers, particularly in relation to their intellectual, social, and literary contexts. My first book, Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor and Modernist Literature (OUP, 2001) explored different ways of relating modernist literary form to the new physics, and considered metaphor in both its expository and cognitive roles. Virginia Woolf (OUP, 2005) related Woolf's fiction to its social and intellectual contexts. I edited a collection of essays, Modernism (Blackwell, 2007), which presents a range of critical perspectives on the literary movement, and have recently completed a book, Reading Modernist Poetry (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), which aims to equip readers to read sometimes difficult poems for themselves. I also have interests in the publishing history of literary and popular scientific texts, most recently seen in my chapter for the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (OUP, 2009).

I am currently editing Woolf's Night and Day for the Cambridge edition of her works. When this work is complete, I will be returning to a project on the use of scientific discourse by poets of the 1920s and 30s including William Empson, Michael Roberts, C. Day Lewis, Herbert Read, and Hugh MacDiarmid.

My undergraduate lecture series have included 'Reading Virginia Woolf', 'Reading Modernist Poetry', and 'Theories of Modernism.'  I have also taught on the post-1900 M.St. course. My undergraduate tutorial teaching covers literature 1832 to the present.  I teach Mods paper 1, papers 2a (Victorian), and 2b (Modern).  Merton offers the full range of options for Mods paper 4, and I have taught those on Thomas Hardy, Literary Theory, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.  For the Finals paper 7 I teach the options on Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.