I joined the University of Birmingham’s English Department in 2018. In 2020, I took up the Co-Directorship of the Centre for Digital Cultures. In 2025, I was promoted to Associate Professor.

My primary area of study concerns search engines: how to study them, how to understand their impact on society, and how to create a wider public understanding of the social and ethical issues they generate. In addition to scholarly outputs, I have contributed to various organisations, including the Open Search Foundation, and am a primary author of the #FreeWebSearch Charter. 

In 2024, I co-founded SEASON: Search Engines and Society Network  with Olof Sundin and Dirk Lewandowski. We held our first annual conference in 2025 in Hamburg, Germany. 

My research explores the intersection of technology, language and culture in contemporary media forms within a global context. In 2023, I published Investigating Google’s Search Engine: Ethics, Algorithms, and the Machines Built to Read Us (Bloomsbury Academic). This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to search engine studies, drawing on a range of disciplines to critique Google's search engine from a philosophical, historical, financial, and ethical standpoint. I use these perspectives to explore topics such as algorithmic discrimination, fake news, and modes of platform capitalism. In doing so, I frame contemporary issues within digital culture as part of a longer history of technological engagement, for example, by looking back to Plato's critique of writing, medieval mnemonic techniques, twentieth-century science of cognition, and building on the twentieth and twenty-first-century traditions of critical theory.

I have also published articles specifically focused on the ethical duties of search engines and am currently working in collaboration with Open Search Foundation, contributing to the #ethicsinsearch project and sitting on the ethics working group. These projects aim to raise public awareness of ethical issues, influence European policy, and develop technological alternatives to the hegemony of Silicon Valley.