Research

My research interests lie primarily in modern literature and literary theory, especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis; Shakespeare; the uncanny; ecocriticism; non-human animals; and creative writing.

I welcome PhD applicants with an interest in any of these areas. I have supervised many doctoral theses, a number of which have later been published as scholarly monographs. Supervised PhDs include:

Simon Stevenson, A Critical and Clinical Reading of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (2003)

Daniel Watt, The Future of the Fragment: Transformations of Writing in the Work of Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee and Jabès (2003)

Peter Jackson, The Legacies of Knut Hamsun: A Literary and Cultural Study (2004)

Pauline Morgan, Elizabeth Bowen: A World of Ghosts (2004)

Lois Wheller, The Enchantment of Laughter: Comic Effect in Fiction and Critical Discourse (2004)

Jonathan Tiplady, Derrida and the Problem of Literature (2004)

Sarah Dillon, A Critical History of the Palimpsest in Modern Literature and Theory (2005)

Jennifer Cooke, ‘But I Ain’t Dead’: Legacies of Plague from Defoe to Romero (2007)

Abigail Curtis, The Freud Effect: At the Limits of Psychoanalysis and Literature (2007)*

Susie Lingham, Imaging Emptiness: Reading the Unconscious from Nagarjuna to Derrida (2008)

Jennifer Huynh, ‘Meanwhile...’: A Study of Narrative Time and Simultaneity (2008)

Christopher Stokes, Coleridge and the Sublime: Language, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2008)

James Theodosius, The Sophistry of Anxiety: A Study of Innocence and Repetition in Søren Kierkegaard and Micheal O’Siadhail (2008)

Alicia Meseguer, Looking-Glass Analysis: Reading Alice through the Portmanteau and the Virtual (2008)

Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (2009)

Christoforos Diakoulakis, Jacques Derrida and the Necessity of Chance (2012)

Bethan Stevens, Lost Works of Art: A Critical and Creative Study of Reception and Restitution (2012)*

Chiara Alfano, Sounding Shakespeare: Acts of Reading in Cavell and Derrida (2012)

Wen-Shan Shieh, Literature in Masks: Katherine Mansfield, Eileen Chang and the Possibilities of Creative Writing (2013)*

Naomi Booth, Swoon: The Art of Sinking (2014)*

Kristian White, Undoing 'You': Blindness and Second Sight in the Second-Person Novel (2016)*

Naomi Wynter-Vincent, In the Penumbra of Wilfred Bion: Possibilities for Literary Criticism (2016)

Robin Shochat Bagon, The Vertigo of the Beast: Thinking Animals in Literature (2016)

Mariam Zia, Religious Orientations, Storytelling and the Uncanny: A Reading of the Adventures of Amir Hamza (2017)

Jemma Deer, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (2017)

Camilla Bostock, Between Letters: D.H. Lawrence, the Nonhuman and the ‘Life of Writing’ (2017)*

(* = Creative and Critical Writing PhD)

My own current research projects include a book about the work of Héléne Cixous; a study of the contemporary novel and narrative theory; and a book about my mother.