My teaching and research at the University of Birmingham focuses on contemporary literature, digital culture and book history. I completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, a Masters at the University of Edinburgh and an undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford. Despite a very English accent, I was born in the USA and educated there, Germany, and in the British state school system.

My research straddles twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literary cultures, with a particular focus on the role of technologies in the ways we read, write, and communicate. This inevitably means I get excited about a wide variety of topics: digital cultures, book and media history (including reading communities), life writing, the institutionalisation of literary studies, interdisciplinary methodologies, cultural studies, transnational modernism and its legacies.

My first book, Literature and the Rise of the Interview examines the rise of the interview in literary culture and was published by OUP in 2018.

My recent work has focused on the intersection between literature and computing since WW2 and is organised into two books. The first Programming Literature (Oxford UP, Oct 2025), traces the ways in which writers have used and thought with computing historically. The second,  Talking Machines (Stanford UP, forthcoming) is an intellectual history of how conversation became a key model for understanding our interactions with computers (a back history of ChatGPT if I am being glib).

This cultural and technological background has led to my role as a Principal Investigator on the Stuart Hall Archive Project (2023-26) where I led the "Dialogues" strand - thinking digitally with Hall - and Project Lead for the AHRC Standard Grant "Language Machines: the Arts & Humanities' contribution to AI" (2026-30), and a collaboration with colleagues across Europe and North America on the "Academic Forms" project (keyforms.ac.uk).

I also write about contemporary literary cultures: I have just published  projects entitled The Social Life of Books (Cambridge UP, 2026) and am working on a book about contemporary reading practices, entitled Reading Among the Machine. My related co-written digital publication, Ego Media, was published with Stanford UP Digital in 2023 and my next project (endlessly delayed) "The Fellowship Era" uses mapping and visualisations to explores the (funding) mechanism of the fellowship as an organising form for literary culture over the last century.

At UoB I am an affiliate of the Institute for Data and AI, co-director of the Centre for Digital Cultures, and a member of the Humanities & Social Sciences Ethical Review Board, with a particular interest in digital research ethics. I am also Head of Research for the School of English, Drama and Creative Studies.