My scholarship encompasses media theory and history, Marxism, critical work on race and racialization, queer and decolonial theories, the history of affect, and radical formalist approaches to media (including but not limited to reality television, horror, and more generally speculative fiction and film). Broadly, I am interested in the ways socio-cultural production can be mapped against their political-economic determinants and effects through close formal analyses of critical theory and visual media.

My monograph, Processes of Abjection, which is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press, aims to queer intellectual histories of ‘the abject’ in philosophy and cultural theory to reveal an abjecting process that has been formative to the development of Western aesthetics. The book works to make visible the conceptual terra nullius of Western aesthetic philosophy upon which seemingly ‘apolitical’, taxonomic theories of what I term ‘classical abjection’ are built. The pluralised theory of abjection my project develops is inherently process-orientated and directly attentive to the subjugation of racialised, gendered and queer subjectivities under neoliberal capitalism. My work mobilises queerness as a method of radical disorientation and contamination, rather than a concept articulated via positive ontologies or identity politics. I argue that the latter has produced certain intellectual and political impasses that my current and ongoing research aims to historicise and overcome by investigating the historical and ideological convergences between the biological taxonomies developed in scientific and medical discourses of the late-nineteenth century and twentieth-century taxonomic approaches to aesthetic analysis within film and media studies. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT: Literary Interpretation Theory, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Social Text, amongst other venues.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Aesthetics
• Critical theory (especially Marxism, decolonial scholarship, queer theory, and critical work on race and racialisation)
• Film and Media Studies
• Literary Theory

Teaching

I teach classes on critical theory, media history and theory, and contemporary cinema including specialist topics such as ‘Queer Decolonial Approaches to Film Analysis’ and ‘Speculative Cinemas’. I am also the coordinator for the first-year core BA course ‘Media Aesthetics’.