Image: Tam Joseph, Spirit of the Carnival (1982)

I am currently at work on a joint study of Byron and political reformer John Hobhouse and Political Animals, a collection of essays on partisanship and political emotion from Swift to Brexit. I am also completing a short book entitled You Are Reading Jane Austen Wrong.

I have been awarded funding to host a conference this spring at Binghamton University on the history and cultures of policing. You can listen to a podcast episode here in which I discuss the differences between British police and American cops, drawing on my work with the Racialized Policing working group.

At the “Uses of Literature” conference last year, I presented “On Books, Blankets, and Tote Bags: Getting ‘Hooked’ on Fiction.” Later this year, I will workshop a paper on Austen and the future of literary study with the Post-Critique working group.

My contribution to a British Academy/Leverhulme Foundation symposium on pandemic literature, will appear in a forthcoming special issue of the Minnesota Review. Earlier this year, I gave a paper at a Cambridge University symposium on Ali Smith’s work, discussing Smith’s improvisational aesthetics and the wake of Brexit.