Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Professor in English Literature
- Dept of English Lang & Literature
- Faculty of Arts & Humanities
I studied English at LMH, Oxford, before doing an MSt and DPhil at Linacre College, Oxford. I was a Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, and a Teaching Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, before becoming a lecturer in the English Departmernt at UCL in 2005 and a Senior Lecturer in 2008. I became a Co-Director of UCL's Urban Lab, where I am responsible for the Cities Imaginaries strand, in 2013. In 2012-13 I held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. I am currently the Department Tutor.


My research
interests currently centre on various aspects of the metropolitan city,
especially at nighttime. My most recent book is
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens (Verso,
2015),
the first instalment of an attempt to reconstruct a cultural
history of the urban subject at night, from the Middle Ages to the
present, in order to present an alternative to the modernist myth of the
flâneur. I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2012-13 to pursue this research. The book is indirectly linked
both to Restless Cities, the collection of essays I edited with Gregory Dart
in 2010, and to the City
Centre I set up in the English Department at UCL in 2010, which has now become the Cities Imaginaries strand of the UCL Urban Laboratory, of which I am a Co-Director. In addition to working on London and other metropolitan cities at night, this time in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I am working on a scholarly edition of Walter Pater's The
Renaissance for OUP's Collected Works of Walter Pater.
My teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature; the fin de
siècle; early modernism; twentieth-century avant-gardes; film; crime
fiction; utopian and dystopian literature; and Marxist and other
literary and cultural theories.
2000 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Oxford | |
1996 | Master of Studies | University of Oxford | |
1994 | Bachelor of Arts | University of Oxford |