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I came to °ÅÀÖ¶ÌÊÓƵ, to take up the Goldsmiths’ Professorship of English Literature, in 2023. Before coming to Oxford I was Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and I have held visiting professorships at the Sorbonne, and at the University of Lille.

Research interests

I am interested in the political role of the literary imagination in helping to create new realities. 

My first books, on Samuel Becket and Don DeLillo, developed a theory which sought to account for the political function of the literary imagination in the wake of modernism. 

My subsequent books have widened the scope of this inquiry, to address the politics of literary fiction more broadly. My most recent book The Possibility of Literature (2024) is a constellatory theory of literary possibility, developed over essays I have written throughout my career, from 2002 to the present. It includes essays on ‘The idea of Beauty’, on ‘Imagining the Future’, and ‘On Rereading Proust’, and addresses writers from Melville and Dickinson to Woolf and Beckett to Zadie Smith and J. M. Coetzee. 

I am currently working on two co-authored books, while writing a long monograph, entitled Fictions of the West, which argues that recent years have seen a crisis in the operability of the fictions that have sustained the idea of the ‘west’ as a political entity. In the light of this crisis, the book suggests, it is necessary to imagine new ways in which fictions might structure the realities that are emerging now, under contemporary geopolitical and ecological conditions. 

Teaching

I have supervised more than thirty DPhil students to completion in a range of areas, including modern and contemporary fiction, literature and science, literary theory, and creative and critical writing. I have also taught courses at undergraduate and taught postgraduate level across the curriculum, with a focus on literature of the 19th to the 21st centuries, on Utopian writing, on critical and literary theory, and on the history of the novel.

Selected Publications

• The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form (2024)
• The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (2020)
• The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1980 – 2018 (2019)
• The Value of the Novel (2015)
• Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013)
• Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, (2009)
• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (1st ed. 2006)
• Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006)