My main research areas are modern literature, the writing of the First World War, life writing, literary impressionism, and futurology.
I have written a critical biography of Ford Madox Ford, and have edited five volumes of Ford’s writing, including an annotated critical edition of Some Do Not . . . (Carcanet, 2010) – the first volume of his tetralogy about the First World War, Parade’s End. I have also written on a broad range of modern and modernist writers – especially James, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot.
Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press 2010) explored the relation between life writing and fiction from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
More recently I have written Imagined Futures, the first book on the extraordinary To-Day and To-Morrow book series – 110 volumes by writers such as Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Hugh MacDiarmid, Bertrand Russell, the scientists J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal, and many other superb inter-war writers. My current research follows on from Imagined Futures, comparing literary speculations about the future to other methodologies of future thinking.
I also have a strong interest in literature and the visual arts, and am working on a book for the centenary of the painter Alfred Cohen.