My research focusses primarily on global Anglophone literatures, examining how the cultural legacies of the British Empire impact on modern and contemporary writing. I have a particular interest in autobiographical narratives and settler cultures. 

My first monograph, Life Writing and the End of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024) draws together a previously unrecognised cohort of white authors who were all raised in former British colonies, travelled to Britain after the Second World War, and later rewrote their memories of colonial life across numerous autobiographical texts. Penelope Lively, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, Janet Frame might seem unlikely subjects for a comparative study, but their memoirs, autobiographies, and autofictions are connected in the ways that they try to 'go home' to the colonial past, long after formal decolonisation. 

I am also the co-editor of an interdisciplinary essay collection which examines how and where the afterlives of empire manifest in modern Britain (British Culture After Empire, MUP 2023). Before holding a post as Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Keele (2020-2022), I worked as a researcher at both the Oxford Centre for Life Writing and PositiveNegatives (SOAS, University of London). My collaborative work and experience in the classroom has informed my research into many forms of experimental life writing, from visual life narratives to collaborative testimony. 

During 2024-2024 I am the Ann Ball Bodley Visiting Fellow in Women's History at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, where I will be working in the University's anti-apartheid movement archives. I am also collaborating with colleagues in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand on a series of events and publications to mark the writer Janet Frame's centenary.