I am a research fellow at the University of Southampton, working across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. I have led the AHRC-funded And Towns projects, which have included research activities for the Mansbridge Heritage Project, Poetry, Policy, and Place, Neighbouring Data, Pathways to Health, and Feeling Towns. Across these projects, I have co-authored an article for Politics and Space on levelling up and affective governance, co-produced a short film with the poet Ella Frears and the filmmaker Annlin Chao, and developed a policy brief for understanding pride in place. I am a Local Policy Innovation Partnership Place Fellow, which draws together much of this work.
I am a specialist policy officer for Public Policy | Southampton and the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities. I co-founded and coordinate the Culture and Creativity Policy Network. I have written about the effects of television when influencing policy, the role of poetry in generating felt evidence, and the use of qualitative data for articulating lived experience. My research on pride in place was also featured as a case study in the UPEN and Durham University publication, "How does Arts and Humanities research influence public policymaking?" I led University support for the Framing the Future report, which made the case for strengthening the visual arts sector and launched in UK Parliament.
I am co-director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing. I have co-organised research days on Idleness and Shortness. I have written a chapter in Carl Schmitt and The Buribunks: Technology, Law, Literature (Routledge, 2022), which explores early cinema’s influence on modernist life-writing. I have also written on recent adaptations of Kafka's The Trial for Law and Humanities. I have forthcoming articles on The Revenge for Love in the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, Samuel Beckett's Ping, and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas. I am a regular contributor to Literary Review.
I publish widely in arts, film, and literary criticism. I have been an international film critic since 2016, covering festivals in Cannes, Locarno, Venice, Berlin, Cairo, Rotterdam, and Tallinn. I am on the editorial board for photogénie and Cinema Year Zero. I have interviewed filmmakers as diverse in sensibility as Agnès Varda, Takashi Miike, Bong Joon-ho, Oliver Assayas, and Peter Greenaway. I have written for the Quietus, MUBI Notebook, the Playlist, We Love Cinema, and Journey into Cinema. I moderated a Q&A with Cècile Embleton, who co-directed the Grierson-award winning documentary Mother Vera.
I have a diverse understanding of global cinema and wider industry trends. I was invited to the Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw, which featured work by King Hu, Mabel Cheung, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, examining embodiment and spatiality in the aesthetics of East Asian cinema. I was selected to attend the Critics’ Workshop at Film Fest Ghent to write about Pedro Costa, and I was invited to speak at a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of Armenian Cinema, which took place in Yerevan under the patronage of UNESCO.
I have written about the nature of modern sovereignty and states of exception in various outlets, including Question, Prospect, and Verso. I am currently writing a book on Carl Schmitt, sovereignty, and modernism.
