I have 25 years experience as a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Literature and Urban Cultures. My early research interests were in the literary representations of New York, its urban cultures and its communities, particularly in the work of the Brooklyn based writer Paul Auster. I have published a monograph and essays on Auster's work, on Cultural Geography and on the work of Don DeLillo. Explorations of the flaneur and the detective, both pedestrian interpreters of the urban environment, in these studies have led me more recently to my own psychogeographic and literary examinations of the city of Stoke on Trent ('A Psychogeography of the Six Towns'. Most recently, with academic and artist colleagues, and with community and student participants, we have employed a walking/creative/industrial heritage methodology to create a 'ceramic cartography' of Stoke neighbourhoods.
Before Staffs, I worked at the OU, Keele, Loughborough, Derby and Northampton. I have taught widely across English, creative and theatre studies, including Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, poetry, modernist theatre (I particularly like Beckett) and literature, the historical range of American lit (from Whitman to Siri Hustvedt, whose What I Loved is one of my favourite novels) and children's literature, as well as modules on critical theories.
The New Vic Theatre in Stoke has a rich history of producing documentary-verbatim plays that have their origins in local communities and issues ('Staffordshire Rebels', 'Fight for Shelton Bar!', 'Nice Girls' and many others) . I work with colleagues at Staffs, Keele and the Vic to employ what has become known as the 'Stoke Method' to explore its development, methodologies and practices to understand its approach and influence and to bring it to a wider audience.
I am Course Director for Media and Digital Communication, which includes the subject areas of Graphics, Photography, Music Production and Sound Design, and Creative Media.
I have supervised PhDs in urban regeneration, the African-American West and Creative Writing.
Academic qualifications
BA (Hons), MA, PhD, HEA Fellow
Expertise
American Literature, Representations of Urban Cultures, Literary and Critical Theories, Psychogeography, Community Arts, the Cultural Histories of Stoke on Trent.
Research interests
Literature, Cities, Walking and Creativity.
Teaching
Literature, Drama, Critical Theories.
Publications
''A Portrait of a Soul in Ruins': Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions'. In Ciocia and Gonzales (eds). The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. An essay exploring the relationship between the imagination and literary and filmic form in a recent Auster novel.
'Paul Auster: a poet of solitude' in David Seed (ed). The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century American Fiction. Blackwell, 2009. A substantial essay exploring major themes and texts in Auster’s work.
Paul Auster. MUP, 2007. A thorough exploration of key themes in Auster’s entire body of work to date (essays, poetry, novels, films and artistic collaborations), focusing in particular on the central role of New York and place in his aesthetic project.
‘ “We don’t go by numbers”: Baseball and Brooklyn in the films of Paul Auster’ in John Manbeck and Robert Singer (ed.s), The Brooklyn Film, McFarland, 2003. pp.127-147. A discussion of the representations of Auster’s own Brooklyn neighbourhood in his films, Smoke and Blue in the Face, deploying Cultural Geography for its insights into community. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 227, Thomson Gale, 2007. p 142-53.
Forthcoming:
'Urban Perspective: dialogues between cultural geography and metropolitan fiction’. A critical survey of key cultural geographers working at the porous boundary between social sciences and literary criticism. Critical Engagements (2012)