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.
State Sponsored Literature
My AHRC-funded PhD Officially Autonomous: Anglophone Literary Cultures and the State since 1945 examined 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.
My book State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020) 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 Literature won the 2021 University English Book Prize, 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 New Books Network podcast.
statesponsoredliterature.com makes publicly accessible some of the materials I used, including: databases of state literary gatekeepers, writer profiles, multimedia resources including a discussion of the book. Please feel free to contact me if you require assistance with accessing it.
Matter of State: Writing, Language and Diversity between Postcolonial Worlds
My next book project revisits two central debates in postcolonial studies: the moral and political legitimacy of writing in ex-colonial languages and 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: 'Linguistic imperialism' with book history in mind.
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 ‘Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club’ at the Chrysler Museum of Modern Arts.
Other activities
At Birmingham, I am director of the Contemporary Literature and Culture research group. In Spring 2025 we co-programmed the Stuart Hall Archive Project 'Readings' seminar 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 the Uncovering Hidden Histories project at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts with students, colleagues and the poet Dzifa Benson - read our alternative museum labels here. In 2019 I co-organized Stuart Hall's Archive: A Symposium to mark the arrival of Hall's archive at the University.
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.