My research focuses on gender, autobiography, and sound in contemporary American culture. My first monograph traced the evolution of the term 'quiet' in American literature since 1850, arguing for a reevaluation of the term as a form of ethical and political engagement. I have written about authors including Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole, Chris Kraus, Roxane Gay, and Elena Ferrante.
My current research looks at debates within contemporary feminism about the use of autobiographical experience as a tool for activism, focussing on the centrality of whiteness to discourses of confession, testimony, power, and believability. I have published articles and chapters on fictional re-imaginings of Hillary Clinton, the racial dynamics of confession in Sylvia Plath, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, and the poetics of oversharing in contemporary mainstream and experimental women's writing.
My current research looks at debates within contemporary feminism about the use of autobiographical experience as a tool for activism, focussing on the centrality of whiteness to discourses of confession, testimony, power, and believability. I have published articles and chapters on fictional re-imaginings of Hillary Clinton, the racial dynamics of confession in Sylvia Plath, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, and the poetics of oversharing in contemporary mainstream and experimental women's writing.
Books
The Quiet Contemporary American Novel
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018 Out now in paperback 'A stylishly written monograph that is packed with interesting readings of contemporary American novels.' - The Cambridge Quarterly 'The Quiet Contemporary American Novel urges us to consider 'quiet' as a dynamic force and, indeed, by concluding with some of the more troubling aspects of quiet as represented in Cole and Lerner's novels, it enacts that dynamic - propelling further, deeper contemplation.' - European Journal of American Culture |
Marilynne Robinson
Co-edited with Jenny Daly and Anna Maguire Elliott Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022 Hardback and ebook now available Marilynne Robinson analyses the growing significance of a critically acclaimed but majorly unstudied contemporary American novelist. The volume touches on themes undervalued in Robinson's work, including: abolitionism and critical race theory, the relationship between science and faith, the neoliberal university, nuclear power and governmental dumping of nuclear waste, the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. |
Journal articles
"never enough, never enough: institutional autobiography and gendered time in contemporary North American women's writing"
European Journal of American Culture, March 2023 This article examines the gendered experience of labour in the North American university to theorize its implications for the production of autobiographical writing and what I call 'institutional autobiography'. Drawing on the work of Dodie Bellamy, Roxane Gay and Heidi Julavits, I make a specifically feminist argument about time, precarity and value in academia, arguing that the job of writing creatively in the academy is complicated by the invisibilization of education and administration as well as the preponderance of women and minorities in non-permanent and therefore precarious academic roles. |
"Imagined Hillarys: Feminism, Fantasy, and Fictional Clintons in The Good Wife and The Good Fight"
Journal of American Studies, Summer 2020 This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS drama The Good Wife (2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central, I argue, to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016. This article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. |
“Who gets to speak and why?: oversharing in contemporary American women’s writing” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Autumn 2017 This article asks how oversharing, the revelation of “too much” personal information, functions as an experimental literary practice in contemporary North American women’s writing. It provides a brief history of oversharing as a cultural term and, through brief analysis of popular texts by Lena Dunham, Emily Gould, and Sheila Heti, and deeper analysis of Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, asks to what extent oversharing can ever constitute a mode of dissent, pointing to the centrality of whiteness in discussions of womanly indiscretion and in deciding what kinds of information are framed culturally as either explicit or mundane. |
“‘If he knew, and if he didn’t: narrative perspective in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels” Irish Journal of American Studies, Summer 2017 “Reading for quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.2, 2017, 108-120 ““All that howling space”: “9/11” and the aesthetic of noise in contemporary American fiction” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 4(1): 2, 2016 “Loud Fictions: The Noise of the Contemporary American Novel” Alluvium 4.3, 2015 |
Book chapters“Confessional Poetry, Confessional Pop: gender, race, and the lyric form in modern American writing and music”
Routledge Companion to Music and Literature, London: Routledge, 2022 “Teju Cole” The Encyclopaedia of Contemporary American Fiction, London: Wiley, 2022 "Marilynne Robinson" Routledge Companion to Twenty-First-Century Literary Fiction, London: Routledge, 2019 “Marilynne Robinson” Dictionary of Literary Biography 378: Novelists on the American Civil War, Columbia: Bruccolli Clark Layman, 2016 “A failure of imagination? Problems in “Post-9/11” fiction” Recovering 9/11 in New York, Robert Fanuzzi, Susan Rosenberg, and Michael Wolfe (eds), Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2014 |
Co-authored journal articles“Contemporary Canonicity, or What Not to Read” - with Arin Keeble and Diletta De Cristofaro
Alluvium 7.1, February 2019 “Roundtable: Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now” - with Arin Keeble and Diletta De Cristofaro Journal of American Studies 52, 2018 “Contemporary Studies Network Roundtable: Responding to Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Generation Anthropocene’” Open Library of Humanities, 22 February 2017 Selected Reviews (Criticism)“Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers”
European Journal of American Studies 38.2, Summer 2019 “American Tantalus: Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuit of US Literature and Culture” Journal of American Studies 50.2, May 2016 “American Unexceptionalism” U.S. Studies Online, 22 August 2014 “Tweeting to Power” LSE Review of Books, 12 May 2014 “A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value” LSE Review of Books, 19 March 2014 |