I am a literary critic who works on modern and contemporary literature, with a particular interest in postcolonial and world literatures and questions of genre and form. I am the author of The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature (2023) and Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (2017)

Two projects currently keep me busy: Global Narratives of Ageing and Disconsolate Forms: Postcolonial Aesthetics. The first of these reorients alarmist debates around ageing by analysing what contemporary world literature and other artforms can tell us about growing old. The second proposes that greater attention to non-Western aesthetic theories would usefully inform the analysis of postcolonial writing.

As part of Global Narratives of Ageing, I was a Knowledge Exchange Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). At TORCH, I ran a project called ‘Ageing and Creativity’. You can discover more about my work on ageing here.

I used to work at Cambridge, Oxford, and Amsterdam, and now hold the Chair in English and American Literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). For the coming years, I will also be a Research Fellow in the English Department at Stellenbosch University.

Links to some of my papers are here.