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• BA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• MA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• DPhil English Literature (University of Oxford)

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

I am a South Londoner of dual heritage, educated in the comprehensive system. I studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield and went on to writeÌýa doctoral thesis on the global phenomenon of post-1945 state literary sponsorship at St Anne's College at Oxford, supervised by Peter D. McDonald, where I spent three happy years in archives. I arrived at Birmingham in 2016, after a year teaching postcolonial and global literatures at Queen Mary University of London.

At Birmingham I have expanded the teaching of postcolonial, global and Black British texts and contexts, including teaching with the BBC Caribbean Voices and Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies archives held at the Cadbury Research Library.Ìý

I teach anglophone writing across the twenty and twenty-first centuries, including modules in postcolonial and global literatures. I was nominated for a College of Arts and Law Outstanding Teaching Award in 2019.

I would be interested to supervise research projects on literature and the modern state, literature and cultural institutions, state sponsorship and protection, and the history of education.

I research how writers interact with cultural, state, educational and publishing institutions in the modern and contemporary period. I am particularly interested in nuancing how we think about the state as a cultural actor by centring the inner conflicts and unexpected consequences of state action. I centre archival methodologies and questions of literary and social difference in my research.Ìý

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State Sponsored Literature

My AHRC-funded PhDÌýexamined how the post-WWII democratic state protected literature economically through a new generation of cultural institutions including the Arts Council, the British Council and Cold War-era cultural diplomacy.Ìý

My bookÌý is the first in-depth study of the British state’s involvement in the literary world. Addressing over 100 primary sources from 10 major public archives, State Sponsored Literature not only shows the extent of state-literary activity in foreign policy, education, and free expression. It also suggests this intervention was determined by the changing publics for literature after empire.

State Sponsored LiteratureÌýwon the , the judges noting that ‘the subject needs an approach which can encompass its labyrinthine, complex and contradictory impulses and expressions, and receives it here’. You can listen to me discuss it on the .

makes publicly accessible some of the materials I used, including: of state literary gatekeepers, , multimedia resources including a . Please feel free to contact me if you require assistance with accessing it.

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Matter of State: Writing, Language and Diversity between Postcolonial Worlds

My next book project revisits two central debates in postcolonial studies:Ìý the moral and political legitimacy of writing in ex-colonial languages andÌý the state and market as chief agents of linguistic imperialism. I suggest we need to move away from models of purity versus contamination, or monolithic power versus weak literary surface.

Adopting a peopled approach to history, it suggests that four principal agents have made and remade literary craft across locations, language systems and material forms in the twentieth century: missionaries, publishers, educators, and writers themselves. This research offers a different perspective on a familiar story of literary colonization and decolonization, one that encompasses colonial multilingualism, attempts to make (and break) the linguistic hegemonies of post-colonial publishing markets and reimaginations of school literary curricula.

You can listen to me talk about this research in my 2024 keynote lecture for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing: .

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African literature and the CIA

I have published on the Africa-based activities and magazines of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1960s, and was an advisor for ‘’ at the Chrysler Museum of Modern Arts.ÌýÌý

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Other activities

At Birmingham, I am director of the Contemporary Literature and Culture research group. In Spring 2025 we co-programmed the at the Birmingham Race Impact Group Cafe, reading and listening to a selection of Stuart Hall’s unpublished lectures, interviews, and letters, and discussing his life and work and our own times.

I co-curated theÌýÌýproject at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts with students, colleagues and the poet Dzifa Benson - read our alternative museum labelsÌý. In 2019 I co-organized Ìýto mark the arrival of Hall's archive at the University.Ìý

I am Director of Awards for the international book history association SHARP and an external examiner for the BA English at City, University of London.