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Summary

I am Professor of Modern and Contemporary English and Director of the Ë®¹ûÅÉAVCentre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW). Formerly, I have successfully filled many roles including Head of English and both Director of Research and Director of Teaching and Learning for Arts & Humanities at Brunel. I hold a BA in Philosophy and Literature (Essex), a PGCE in Secondary English (Sussex), an MA in Critical Theory (Sussex), a DPhil (on George Orwell and Mass-Observation) in English Literature (Sussex) and a PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Brunel).

I am an interdisciplinary researcher whose work combines the fields of Politics, History, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies. My current reseach project is 'Self-reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars, and Social Change in Britain' for which I have been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2023-24.

I am the author of Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006, second edition 2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017). I am co-author (with Philip Tew) of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013). I am the co-editor (with Aris Mousoutzanis) of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), (with Philip Tew) of London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), (with Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Joseph Norman) of The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018), (with Ben Clarke) of Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (2018), and (with Jennie Taylor and Philip Tew) of Growing Old with the Welfare State (2019). I am one of the series editors (with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson) of The Decades Series: British Fiction with Bloomsbury Academic, which covers 100 years of transformational change in the field of British fiction. I have co-edited seven of the ten volumes in this series: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015), The 1950s (2018), The 1930s (2021), The 2010s (forthcoming 2024), and The 1920s (forthcoming 2025).