Talks

upcoming
- ‘Good Bad Books: Our Love Affair with Dystopia’ (professorial inaugural lecture, University of Birmingham, March 2025)
- ‘George Orwell: Free Speech is Not a Free-for-All’ (Malvern College, Malvern, Worcestershire, February 2025)
2024
- ‘Orwell, 1984, etc.’, Zoom event with Dorian Lynskey and Mary Stack for Cambridge Forum (November 2024)
- post-performance Q&A with the cast of 1984, adapted by Ryan Craig, directed by Lindsay Posner, and starring Keith Allen, Mark Quartley, and Eleanor Wyld (Malvern Theatre, Worcestershire, October 2024)
- with Dorian Lynskey and Lisa Mullen, ‘1984 in 2024: What would Orwell say?’ (Thames Christian School, London, February 2024)
- ‘Wyndham Lewis Misreading Orwell’ (alongside Débora Tavares at Reading and Misreading Orwell, co-hosted by The Orwell Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Studies, London, January 2024)
- with Rebecca Beasley, ‘Editing Wyndham Lewis: Challenges and Opportunities’ (BAMS Modernist Editing Event, online, January 2024)
2023
- ‘How do we best express the value of English Studies?’, panel discussion hosted by the English Association (October 2023) [video]
- ‘“The only good writer of a decade or more”: George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis, and the Politics of the Novel’, inaugural lecture for Visiting Fellowship (Northumbria University, September 2023)
- with Selena Daly and Gemma Moss, ‘Modernism, Fascism, and the Avant-Garde’ (British Association of Modernist Studies, online, July 2023)
- ‘Is Free Speech Free? George Orwell and the Limits of Liberty’, Gropius Lecture (Impington Village College, Cambridge, May 2023)
- with Jo Cottrell, ‘Women in Art: The Case of Vorticism’ (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, March 2023)
- ‘Women in Art: Wyndham Lewis’s Froanna’ (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, February 2023)
2022
- ‘Cancel Culture, Extreme Politics, and Apology’ (Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, Hay-on-Wye, June 2022) [audio available via Hay Player; paywalled]
- ‘Flirting with Wyndham Lewis: Proto- to Post-Fascist’ (London Modernism Seminar, Institute of English Studies, March 2022) [delivered on my behalf by Suzanne Hobson]
- ‘George Orwell wasn’t a Prophet (and it’s a good thing, too)’ (Malvern Festival of Ideas, Malvern, March 2022)
- ‘Wyndham Lewis and Tyranny’ (School of Politics and International Studies, University of Hull, January 2022)
- ‘Lucifer, Liberty, and Light: George Orwell and John Milton’ (Institute for British and American Studies, University of Regensburg, January 2022)
2021
- ‘George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Idea of Crisis’ (Literary (Non)Fiction in Times of Crisis, Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, Poznan, Poland, May 2021) [keynote lecture]
2019
- ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter: George Orwell’s Re-Joycing’ (Work-in-Progress Meeting, Centre for Modernist Cultures, University of Birmingham, October 2019)
- ‘Oceania’s Dirt: Mess, Filth, and Nausea in Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984 Now, University of Oxford, October 2019)
- ‘Modern Cities, Modern Dystopias: Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, and George Orwell’ (Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, September 2019)
- ‘Vorticist Voices’ [panel response] (Troublesome Modernisms, BAMS 2019, King’s College, London, June 2019)
2018
- ‘Brave-New-Worldites: Wyndham Lewis via George Orwell’ (MSA, Columbus, OH, November 2018) [delivered on my behalf by Karolyn Steffens]
- ‘Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism’ (Department of English Literature Staff Research Conference, University of Birmingham, July 2018)
- ‘Work in Focus: “Portrait of T. S. Eliot” by Wyndham Lewis’ (The Royal Academy of Arts, London, July 2018) [audio]
- ‘Katherine Mansfield, George Meredith, and Beethoven’s Hearing Eyes’ (CLEMT Summer Symposium, University of Birmingham, May 2018)
- ‘Beethoven, Dorothy Richardson, and Musicology’ (Transitions: Bridging the Victorian-Modernist Divide, University of Birmingham, April 2018)
2017
- ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Evanescent Cities’ (The City as Modernist Ephemera, London South Bank University, June 2017) [keynote lecture]
- ‘Moonlighting: Beethoven, Literature, and the First World War’ (Modern Literature Graduate Seminar, University of Oxford, January 2017)
2016
- ‘Beethoven and British Literature, 1902-1927’ (Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, November 2016)
- ‘Form vs Function: Why Does Modernism Get All the Credit?’ (Interdisciplinary Modernism Research Group, University of Nottingham, October 2016)
- ‘Facing Beethoven: Literature, Sculpture, and Identity’ (Royal Society of Edinburgh, September 2016)
- ‘Problems, Possibilities, and Polemics: Taking the Arrows of Wyndham Lewis’ (Editing Modernism, Edinburgh Napier University, May 2016) [keynote lecture]
- ‘Beethoven, Modernist Fiction, and Representation’ (Interdisciplinary Modernism Research Group Study Day, University of Nottingham, March 2016)
- ‘Wyndham Lewis’s “brave-new-worldites”: Huxley, Orwell, and Wells’ (University of Buckingham, March 2016)
- ‘Lawrence Atkinson, “the vorticist artist of whom England [has] never heard”’ (Obscure Modernism, Birkbeck, University of London, February 2016) [audio]
2015
- ‘“My name is …”: James Bond, Masculinity, and the Mother Land’ (Popular Culture Lecture Series, University of Nottingham, November 2015)
- ‘Classical Music, Fascism, and Dystopia: Katharine Burdekin and Storm Jameson in the 1930s’ (Modernism and Revolution, MSA 17, Boston College, Boston University, and the College of the Holy Cross, November 2015)
- ‘Classical Music, Fascism, and Dystopia: Katharine Burdekin and Storm Jameson in the 1930s’ (Brave New Worlds: The Dystopia in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Newcastle University, April 2015)
- with Christina Lee, ‘“I am your forefather”: Star Wars and/as Medieval Dystopia’ (Popular Culture Lecture Series, University of Nottingham, May 2015; also delivered at New History Lab, University of Leicester, November 2015)
- ‘Wyndham Lewis: Ideology, Politics, and Fascism’ (University of Nottingham, Ningbo Campus, China, March 2015)
2014
- ‘“All the great artists have been immoral”: Beethoven, J. W. N. Sullivan, and H. G. Wells’ (The Music of War: 1914-1918, British Library, August 2014)
- ‘Cecil Gray, Wyndham Lewis, and The Sackbut’ (BLAST 2014, Bath Spa University, July 2014)
- ‘Busty Beethoven’ (Objects of Modernity, University of Birmingham, June 2014)
- ‘Editing Modernism: Where Are We Now? – Editing and Reputation’ (closing roundtable for Modernism Now!, Institute of English Studies, London, June 2014)
- ‘Benefiting Artists in General: Lawrence Atkinson’s Post-War Workshops’ (Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity, University of Birmingham, April 2014)
2013
- ‘Political Spirits of Beethoven: Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, and J. W. N. Sullivan’ (The Condemned Playground: Aldous Huxley and his Contemporaries, University of Oxford, September 2013)
- ‘John Buchan (1875-1940): A Reassessment of his Life and Work’ (Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, September 2013)
- ‘Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and the Modernist Concert Review’ (Everydayness and the Event, MSA 15, University of Sussex, August 2013)
- ‘Music and Society in D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod’ (D. H. Lawrence Society, D. H. Lawrence Heritage Centre, Eastwood, Nottingham, June 2013)
- ‘“The best that has been thought and uttered”: British Literary Modernism, German Classical Music, and the First World War’ (Centre for Regional Literature and Culture Seminar Series, University of Nottingham, January 2013)
2012
- ‘“What people used to call high art”: Classical Music, Technocracy, and Brave New World’ (‘Brave New World’ and its Legacies, Institute of English Studies, London, October 2012)
- ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Musical War’ (Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’: Modernism and the First World War, Institute of English Studies, London, September 2012)
- ‘Spells of Suggestive Sound: Affect and Aurality in Under Western Eyes’ (Joseph Conrad Society’s 38th Annual Conference, Bath Spa University, July 2012)
- ‘Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the Post-war-to-end-war World’ (Wyndham Lewis Reading Group, Institute of English Studies, London, May 2012)
2010
- ‘John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity’ (opening address for John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity, Institute of English Studies, London, July 2010)
- ‘Ford Madox Ford and the Utopian Potential of Music’ (Modernism and Utopia, Birmingham, April 2010)
2009
- ‘The Politics of “Simplicity” in Ford Madox Ford’s The Simple Life Limited’ (Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945, University of Oxford, September 2009)
- ‘BLAST, Utopia, and “Disruption”’ (Narrative, International Society for the Study of Narrative, Burlington Hotel, Birmingham, July 2009)
- ‘John Buchan’s Middlebrowness: Fearing Modernism, Aspiring to Modernity’ (The Fears and Aspirations of the ‘Masculine Middlebrow’ Writer, 1880-1950, Institute of English Studies, University of London, April 2009)
2006
- ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Aesthetics of Travel’ (New Directions in Travel Writing Studies: A Postgraduate Colloquium, The Nottingham Trent University, March 2006)