I am Project Lead (Principal Investigator) on the AHRC-funded project Beyond the Essay (2026 – 2029), which aims to reinvigorate English and Literature studies in schools and universities by reuniting creative and critical practices. Students did not always study literature by writing essays about it: they learned by imitating, transforming, paraphrasing, translating, and composing. What we now separate into ‘criticism’ and ‘creative writing’ were once part of the same practice. The project will produce the first history of the teaching of literature, conduct classroom-based research, develop open-access teaching resources, and bring together scholars, teachers, and exam boards to rethink the subject in the UK and beyond.

I studied for my undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Oxford, with a year at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar, before working as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. I joined UEA in 2011. 

In 2021 I founded the creativecritical.net website, which serves as a forum for writing, teaching, and debate about the relations between creative and critical practice, in and beyond the academy.

This interest grows out of my research and teaching on literary play. Since 2013, I have taught an MA module, Ludic Literature, in which we not only study such authors as Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Borges, Stein, Muldoon, Mullen, and Anne Carson, but imitate, parody, and transpose their styles and forms. Students have written about their experience on the module extensively here. Through this module I have developed a research interest in the history and practice of teaching through imitation and play, in both modernism and the Renaissance.  

My first book, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play (Oxford University Press, 2011), explored Nabokov’s career-long engagement with play as both subject and style. I’m also the editor of Nabokov’s Collected Poems (Penguin / Knopf, 2012), the co-translator of his verse play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Penguin / Knopf, 2013), and the author of various articles on Nabokov’s work. From 2018 – 2019 I served as the President of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. My work on Nabokov has been widely reviewed internationally.

Alongside this, I have worked on the long tradition of the literary essay, particularly in relation to the modern academic essay. I am co-editor of On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2020), for which I contributed a chapter, ‘What is an Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf’, and co-authored the introduction. My work in this area has led to a broader interest in the history of literary pedagogy.

I speak frequently at conference and policy events on creative-critical teaching and the essay.

I am open to enquiries about PhD supervision, but have limited capacity in the next few years. I am particularly interested in creative-critical projects. I currently supervise work on critical and creative-critical topics including writing ‘after’ Kafka, the anti-plot novel after Beckett, transgressive translation, Moroccan Jewish writing, and experimental British women’s fiction. I have supervised PhDs to completion on subjects including Nabokov and disgust, Donald Barthelme, the lyric essay, and creative-critical approaches to contemporary fiction.

I have also written articles and essays on a number of other subjects, including Ivan Bunin, ‘evolutionary criticism’, Wyndham Lewis’s portraits, John Updike as a humourist, and Virginia Woolf, and publish occasionally in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

As well as my academic projects, I am working on an essayistic book intended for a broad audience, entitled City of Words, about forty words and their ambiguities in contemporary speech - a book superficially akin to Raymond Williams’s Keywords.