Academic work
My academic work examines the manifestations of utopia, the commons, and precarity in contemporary culture, with a particular interest in post-2008 poetry, novels, and speculative fiction, and cultural production within contemporary global activist movements.
In 2020 I finished writing my PhD dissertation at Birkbeck, University of London.
Photograph by Carly Marie Robinson (@carlymarierobbbo)
Utopian Acts 2018
In 2018, along with Katie Stone, I organised Utopian Acts 2018, a one-day festival and conference exploring the relationship between activism, art, and academia. The conference programme, photos, and blog posts are available on the Utopian Acts website.
Photograph by Daniel Jackery
Publications
- 'Come here, it sang, listen': Juliana Spahr's commons poetics in That Winter the Wolf Came, Textual Practice (2020).
- Responding to the Chance of Space in Marshland, Alluvium, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2016).
- Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature, Alluvium, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2015).
Podcasts and recordings
- 'A Constellation of Commons' and discussion with Tamara de Groot and Robin van den Akker on utopia and the commons, for Techne Congress: Back to the Future, July 2020, Loughborough University London.
Unpublished work
- Imagining the End of Capitalism: Utopia and the Commons in Contemporary Literature, PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London (2020).
- Riot Noises: Verbatim Theatre Representations of the 2011 UK Riots and the Limits of Comprehension, MA dissertation, King's College, London (2016).
- (Un)mapping the Edgelands: Towards a new genre in contemporary British literature, Honours dissertation, Australian National University (2014).
Conference papers
- With Beyond Gender Collective. "Navigating Beyond Gender: The City in Feminist Science Fiction." (Un)fair Cities: Equity, Ideology and Utopia in Urban Texts, December 2019, University of Limerick.
- "Never a Common Common Enough: Ongoing Futures in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr." Poetics in Commons, May 2019, University of Sheffield.
- "'Life! Life! Life!': The Precarious Utopianism of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140." Disruption, Displacement, and Disorder: 43rd Society for Utopian Studies Conference, November 2018, University of California Berkeley.
- "The Utopian Body in Contemporary Literatures of Crisis." British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies - What Happens Now, July 2018, Loughborough University.
- "'It's All Good, It's All Fucked': The Anti-Capitalist Commons in Contemporary Poetry." Movements: Protest, Politics and Activism in the Twenty-First Century, July 2018, Nottingham Contemporary.
- "Lines of Flight: The Utopian Escape in Contemporary Speculative Literature." Utopia, Now!, August 2017, Chelsea College of Arts, London. (Audio)
- "Troubled Solidarity, Precarious Utopias." Solidarity and Utopia: 18th Utopian Studies Society Conference, July 2017, Gdańsk, Poland.
- "The Snow and the Zone: Creating communitas on the thresholds of sf cinema." CRSF 2017, June 2017, University of Liverpool.
- "Occupy the Threshold: Locating occupation protests in liminal space." Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression, May 2017, Birkbeck, University of London.
- "A Poetics of Emptiness: Naming places at the urban margin." 2015 ELLAK International Conference: Spaces/Spatialities: Practices, Encounters and Articulations, December 2015, Busan, South Korea.