I am Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. I work on twentieth-century literature and culture. I am both a literary critic and a cultural historian and I am invested in finding new ways to represent the complex relationships between life, literature and history. I am a 2013 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.

As a result, much of my work crosses genres and disciplines. I am the author of four works of cultural history in which I explore the relationship between works of literature, the times they’re written in, the impact of history on the books and the lives of the creators of the books, and how both the life shapes the work and the work shapes the life.