Research Overview

His first book, Conrad, Language, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2002), received the Joseph Conrad Society of America's Adam Gillon Award for the most significant work in Conrad studies from 2001-4. Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory (Palgrave, 2006) is a study of the reception and representation of theoretical ideas in literary fiction since the 1960s. Sleep and the Novel (Palgrave, 2018) examines representations of the sleeping body in fiction since 1800. An A-Z of Jane Austen (Bloomsbury, 2022) provides an exploratory guide to themes, places, tropes and concepts in the work of the great novelist, from A is for Accident to Z is for Zigzag. An Italian translaton, Jane Austen dalla A alla Z, appears from Donzelli Editore in 2025. '"So Many Friends!": Gregariousness and Its Discontents in Jane Austen' received the Monroe K. Spears Award for the best article to appear in Studies in English Literature in 2022. Technosleep: Fictions, Frontiers, Futures (Palgrave, 2023), co-authored with Catherine Coveney, Eric Hsu, Rob Meadows and Simon Williams, considers the fate of "natural" slumber in the modern world. His current research is on manhunt narratives in nineteenth-century British fiction.