Teaching (2008-present)

I’ve taught in universities across a wide range of subjects and time periods, from Chaucer right up to the present. At undergraduate level I concentrate on twentieth-century literature; at postgraduate level I tend to contribute to modules on modernism and the early twentieth-century novel. I regularly convene a final-year undergraduate module devoted to the work and thought of George Orwell, who also often features in my dissertation supervisions.

Postgraduate Research Students

Current (4 PhDs, 2 MAs by Research)
- Helen Alexander, PhD, ‘From Music and Dance to Poetry and Prose, Music is Life: Developing a Literary Theory of Musicality through an Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s Life and Work’ (secondary supervisor)
- Anong Bentur, MA by Research, ‘Modernist and Postmodernist Women Writers from Postcolonial South Asia’ (secondary supervisor)
- Natalia Carter, MA by Research, ‘Literary Graves: Archival Remains and Maternal Voices of the First World War’ (secondary supervisor)
- Oliver Evans, PhD, ‘Sounding Mid-Century: The Fraught Aurality of Late Modernism’ (secondary supervisor)
- Luke Gilfedder, PhD, ‘Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Right’ (lead supervisor)
- Danielle Wallace, PhD, ‘Appropriating Primal Energy: Modernist Sculpture and Non-Western Influence’ (secondary supervisor)

Completed (7 PhDs, 2 MAs by Research)
- Liam Knight, PhD, ‘On Endotextuality: Literary Dystopias, Texts-within-Texts, and Post-Truth’, lead supervisor (2024)
- William Bateman, PhD, ‘The Affront of Otherness in D. H. Lawrence’s Writings on Travel’, lead supervisor (2022)
- Matilda Blackwell, PhD, ‘Reading the Bathroom in Early Twentieth-Century Women's Writing’, secondary supervisor (2021)
- Daniel Buckingham, PhD, ‘“Licence to Tease”: Satire and Apology in the Twentieth-Century Middlebrow’, lead supervisor (2021)
- Luke Gilfedder, MA by Research, ‘Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the Ancient Lights’, lead supervisor (2020)
- Emily Heathcote, PhD, ‘Julian Barnes, John Fowles, and B. S. Johnson: Case Studies in the Postmodern, the Author, and Text Editing’, secondary supervisor (2020)
- Daniel Buckingham, MA by Research, ‘Wodehouse, Waugh, and Misogyny’, lead supervisor (2018)
- Hollie Johnson, PhD, ‘Ecodystopia: Environmental Apocalypse and the Ecocidal Imagination’, secondary supervisor (2018)
- Emma Zimmerman, PhD, ‘Architexture: Space, Form, and the Modernist Novel’, secondary supervisor (2015)

Examining (20 PhDs, 1 MA by Research)
I’ve acted as the internal examiner for 13 PhD theses at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham, and as the external examiner for 7 PhD theses and 1 MA by Research thesis at Durham University; King’s College, London; the University of Liverpool; the Open University; Queen’s University, Belfast; the University of Reading; the University of Strathclyde; and the University of Westminster.

Education Prize Nominations
- 2021: Outstanding Teaching Award, University of Birmingham (nominated)
- 2020: Outstanding Teaching Award, University of Birmingham (nominated)
- 2019: Outstanding Teaching Award, University of Birmingham (nominated)
- 2017: Supervisors: Best Research Supervisor, University of Nottingham (nominated)
- 2016: Teaching: Best All Rounder, University of Nottingham (nominated)
- 2016: Personal Tutor: Best All Rounder, University of Nottingham (nominated)

I’ve also contributed courses on Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to Massolit (available, via subscription, here and here).