My scholarship to date centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and American poetry. I am currently working on a creative-critical project examining the literature and culture of the global ocean, with a particular focus on sharks.

My first book was entitled Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture: Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, and Bob Dylan (Ashgate, 2014). Exploring the influence of Europe’s artist-émigrés on New York City culture from 1912 onwards, it argued that collage was a transformative practice and provocative theoretical model that was central to modernism and its aftermaths, revolutionizing the ways in which literature was written and art and music was made during the twentieth century.

My second monograph, Multiple Voices: New York City Poetry from the Mimeograph Revolution to the HIV/AIDS Pandemic, asks: how can poetic forms challenge structural oppression? How does poetry engage with forms of discrimination? To what extent can poets change the world through language? Taking as its exemplars a range of poetry published in New York between 1950-1995, it explores the possibilities and parameters of poetic resistance. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive study of New York’s poetry and poetic voices, and illuminates the quiet heroism and long history of hopeful struggle inherent in dissident poems and voices, providing a contemporary model for everyday rebellion, dissident reading, and alternate world-building in the 21st century.

I am the editor, with Yasmine Shamma and Nick Sturm, of Conversations with New York School Poets (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). In this collection, twenty-five New York School poets explore and define the milieu they wrote from, and shed light on their journeys through New York and through poetry. Collected over a three-year period, these fascinating conversations tackle, reframe, and probe the question of what constitutes the New York School.

My first poetry collection, a lyric memoir about my sister, called I Remember Kim, was published in 2023, with Verve Poetry Press. My new poetic project is called Shadows and Benedictions: a personal history of sharks.

In 2020 I was awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant for the project Creating the Network for New York School Studies. The project created an official global Network designed to offer scholars, poets, creative organizations, and members of the public an intellectual and creative community within the wide and growing field of New York School studies. In 2018 I was awarded a British Academy Small Grant (2018-2020) for the digital humanities project Joe Brainard and the New York School: Material Texts and Digital Cultures (or 'Make Your Own Brainard'), which puts the work of New York School artist and poet Joe Brainard into dialogue with digital media and digital media users via an interactive website (Make Your Own Brainard) and examines questions about hegemonic narratives surrounding academic impact, funding for the arts, and the digital humanities.

I have written articles and chapters (published and forthcoming) on Bob Dylan in the 1980s, Frank O'Hara and the New York School, Allen Ginsberg and queer sexuality, John Ashbery's queer poetics of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Black queer kinship and the poetry of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, teaching Bernadette Mayer, teaching the mimeograph revolution, the ecopoetics of Anne Waldman's Life Notes, Joe Brainard and queer optimism, New York poetry, American women poet-editors and the mimeograph revolution, Joe Brainard and John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg and collage, place, space and identity in Richard Yates, William Burroughs, affect, and taste, and William Burroughs and art.

I am a Londoner who grew up in Kenya. I joined Birmingham as a Teaching Fellow in 2015, and as a Lecturer in 2016, where I have broadened the teaching of modern American poetic texts and contexts. I became Associate Professor in 2021. I previously taught at University College London, where I received my PhD, and I also spent several years working in student support and in the educational charity sector.