I joined the English Department at Edinburgh as a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in September 2014. Prior to this I taught at the University of Strathclyde, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Birmingham, the Open University and the University of Cambridge, where I obtained my PhD. I hold a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Sydney, a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from Queen Mary University of London, and a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from the University of Victoria. I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. You can find more information about me and my projects on my website.

My work lies at the intersection of digital humanities and C20th/C21st literature, with a particular emphasis on the way scholarly technologies can help us to better understand the development and dissemination of literary movements such as modernism. I am also interested in contemporary reading cultures, and the new ways that texts reach readers in digital environments.

My research looks at the development of literary modernism in the Anglophone world beyond the British Isles and the United States. My most recent book, co-edited with Ian Henderson, is a collection of essays on the Australian modernist writer Patrick White. I have published articles on Anglophone modernisms in the journals Canadian Literature,Australian Literary Studies and Topia, and have a chapter on Australian, New Zealand and Canadian modernist fiction forthcoming in the Oxford History of the Novel in English. I am also interested more broadly in postcolonial writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I am particularly interested in digital humanities approaches to this area, including the use of geo-spatial technologies and network analysis software to chart the transmission of ideas and the dissemination of material artefacts which enabled modernist styles, genres, forms and concepts to travel around the globe. I have published essays on this topic in the International Journal of Canadian Studies and ELN: English Language Notes. I have an interactive map of modernist Paris, built with the SIMILE project’s Exhibit and Timeline scripts, which I have used to plot points from the narrative of John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse and other locations of relevance to art, literature, and culture of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. I have also built a digital map for others to use in their teaching and research, and I welcome enquiries about it. I received funding to build these projects from the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK.

A second area of research is reading and reception study in the contemporary period, especially in relation to digital culture. I was PI on the AHRC-funded project Developing Methods for Analysing and Evaluating Literary Engagement in Digital Contexts, and in 2012 I published an edited collection on this subject in the University of Massachusetts Press's series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. I have other essays on contemporary reading in the journals Canadian Literature, Narrative, Participations, Language and Literature and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, as well as several book chapters on the topic.

I am part of an international group of scholars working to build a digital resource to facilitate collaborative scholarship on twentieth-century literary letters. You can read about this project, Twentieth-Century Literary Letters, at our website. I was also a co-applicant for Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC), a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada and directed by Professor Dean Irvine at Dalhousie University in Canada.

Semester 2, 2015-16

• Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (PG)
• Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (UG)

Semester 2, 2015-16

• Global Modernisms: Inter/national Responses to Modernity (UG, course leader, co-taught)
• Contemporary Postcolonial Writing (UG)
• Research Skills & Methods (PG, co-taught)

Semester 1, 2014-15

• Modernism: Making it New (UG)
• Cultures of the Book (PG, co-taught)
• Research Skills & Methods (PG, co-taught)

Semester 2, 2014-15

• Digital Humanities for Literary Studies (PG)
• Contemporary Postcolonial Writing (UG)

I have also published work on teaching in digital contexts. I ran a research project at Queen Mary University of London which used a social network site to develop students’ intercultural awareness, and published the results in a special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education on the topic of Digital Humanities, Digital Futures. I wrote a case study for the UK Higher Education Academy’s English Subject Centre about using online learning journals to help students in English literature get to grips with literary theory. I have also written about using techniques from corpus linguistics to analyse online student discussions, in order to work out how to help students engage with each other in a mediated environment.