These include: twentieth century British literature, cinema, and cultural politics, particularly the inter-war period, the 1950s and contemporary culture; language and cultural theory; language debates in Ireland in the twentieth century; cultural memory; theories of gender and sexuality; popular culture; the nineteenth century novel; Renaissance and nineteenth and twentieth century drama.
After graduating from Sussex University with a degree in English in the School of Cultural and Communication Studies, I went on to postgraduate research at Southampton University under the supervision of Dr Peter Middleton and Dr Linda Williams. Here, I completed a PhD on the relationships between discourses of sexuality, culture and class in selected works by four women writers, Marie Stopes, Rebecca West, Storm Jameson and Dorothy L.Sayers, produced in the inter-war period in Britain. My first post was a lectureship in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. I joined the Department at MMU in September 2001. I have published on Marie Stopes, Storm Jameson, Dorothy L.Sayers and Irvine Welsh and I am one of the editors of the Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader.
My current research focuses upon the political and ethical questions that are raised by fictional and biographical accounts of Alzheimer’s disease. I am particularly interested in the language and metaphors with which Alzheimer’s is textually constructed, and the ways in which writers perceive the impact of the disease upon selfhood and identity (both theirs and that of the sufferer). This research is part of the Cultural Memory and Ethics project established here at MMU by Dr Richard Crownshaw and myself in 2001, and I am working on a monograph on this area. I also have a research interest in the relationships between literature, culture and politics in contemporary culture, specifically representations of working class resistance and dissent, and I maintain a strong interest in inter-war women’s writing and gender, sexuality and modernity. A recent publication of mine in this area can be found in Ann Ardis and Lesley Lewis (eds), Women’s Experience of Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). I would be happy to supervise postgraduate research on any of these or related areas.