黑料吃瓜网

• BA (University of York)
• MA (University College London)
• PhD (University College London)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

I am a Londoner who grew up in Kenya. I joined Birmingham as a Teaching Fellow in 2015, and as a Lecturer in 2016, where I have broadened the teaching of modern American poetic texts and contexts. I became Associate Professor in 2021. I previously taught at University College London, where I received my PhD, and I also spent several years working in student support and in the educational charity sector.听

This year, I'm convening and teaching my final-year and MA specialist subject modules 'Multiple Voices: New York City Poetics' and 'Modern American Poetry'. I also contribute lectures to 'Gender and Sexuality' and 'Discovering North American Literature', and teach on the MA module 'Modernism and Contemporary Literature'. I was the 2020/21 winner of the Guild Outstanding Teaching Award.

I welcome research proposals on American poetry, New York City literature and culture (particularly the New York School, Nuyorican poetry, queer writing, and/or HIV/AIDS), collage, and other aspects of literature and culture relating to my research.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the 黑料吃瓜网.

My scholarship centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and American poetry.

My first book was entitled听听(Ashgate, 2014). Exploring the influence of Europe鈥檚 artist-茅migr茅s on New York City culture from 1912 onwards, it argued that collage was both a transformative practice and a provocative theoretical model that was central to modernism and its aftermaths, revolutionizing the ways in which literature was written and art and music was made during the twentieth century.

I am currently writing my second monograph, Multiple Voices: New York City Poetry from the Mimeograph Revolution to the HIV/AIDS Pandemic.听 Multiple Voices听asks: how can poetic forms challenge structural oppression? How does poetry engage with forms of discrimination? To what extent can poets change the world through language? Taking as its exemplars a range of poetry published in New York between 1950-1995, it explores the possibilities and parameters of poetic resistance. In doing so, it both offers a comprehensive study of New York鈥檚 poetry and poetic voices, and illuminates the quiet heroism and long history of hopeful struggle inherent in dissident poems and voices, providing a contemporary model for everyday rebellion, dissident reading, and alternate world-building in the 21st century.

I am also the editor, with Yasmine Shamma, of听Conversations with New York School Poets (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). In this collection, twenty-five New York School poets explore and define the milieu they wrote from, and shed light on their journeys through New York and through poetry. Collected over a three-year period, these fascinating conversations tackle, reframe, and probe the question of what constitutes the New York School.

My first poetry collection, a lyric memoir about my sister, called听, was published in 2023, with Verve Poetry Press. I am currently working on a new poetic project,听Shadows and Benedictions: a personal history of sharks.

In 2020 I was awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant for the project . The project has created an official global Network designed to offer scholars, poets, creative organizations, and members of the public an intellectual and creative 黑料吃瓜网 within the wide and growing field of New York School studies. In 2018 I was awarded a British Academy Small Grant (2018-2020) for the digital humanities project Joe Brainard and the New York School: Material Texts and Digital Cultures听(or 'Make Your Own Brainard'), which has put the work of New York School artist and poet Joe Brainard into dialogue with digital media and digital media users via an interactive website ()听and examines questions about hegemonic narratives surrounding academic impact, funding for the arts, and the digital humanities.

I have written articles and chapters (published and forthcoming) on Bob Dylan in the 1980s, Frank O'Hara and the New York School, Allen Ginsberg and queer sexuality, John Ashbery's queer poetics of the HIV/AIDS crisis, , , , , ,听, 听,听,听,听, , and听.

I co-direct the Centre for the Study of North America. I also write for the Times Literary Supplement, and am a member of the European Beat Studies Network (EBSN), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). Recent and forthcoming events I’ve curated include:

•  (Université Gustave Eiffel, 2022)
• Queer New York (黑料吃瓜网, 2021)
• People&Pages: an evening of poetry (Waylands Yard, Birmingham City Centre 2019)
• Third Personism: The FBI's Poetics of Immediacy in the 1960s (with Professor Lytle Shaw (NYU), 黑料吃瓜网, 2019)
•  (with Alice Notley, 黑料吃瓜网/Winterbourne House, 2018 - co-organised with Dr Yasmine Shamma)