I am a cultural and literary geographer and university lecturer. My teaching and writing span the fields of cultural geography, literary geography, cultural studies, and folklore.
My research is primarily concerned with the cultural and literary geographies of folklore, affect and the spatial experience. I am particularly interested in the spatial relations that exist between folkloric narratives, memory and place, and the experiential qualities of absence.
I am co-editor of the University of Wales Press’ Literary Geography: Theory and Practice book series and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
My work is organised around three core themes: [1] Literary, regional and historical geographies of folklore, particularly those associated with the rural counties of East Anglia (and in literary representations of its landscape(s)); [2] Absence, place and memory; especially in the areas of spectral geography, hauntology and the phenomenology of absence; [3] Creative, embodied and experimental geographic research practices; specifically auto-ethnographic, sonic, visual methods, and walking.
I was organiser of the Strange Naturalism: Reflections on Occult Geographies symposium (2011), co-organiser, together with fellow geographer and artist Rupert Griffiths, of the week-long international conference Uncanny Landscapes (2013), which included a series of symposia, artists talks, postgraduate workshops and an exhibition, and a co-organiser of the JSPS-funded Discovering “Dai-Nippon”: Memory, Place and the Politics of Identity (2017). I was co-investigator on the two-year JSPS-funded collaborative research project Literary Geographies of Absence, led by Prof. Sheila Hones (The University of Tokyo). An up-to-date list of my publications can be found here.
I am currently working on a book-length project examining the literary and cultural geographies of folklore in the UK and Japan.
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Education
- PhD Cultural Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London (2014)
- PGCE Post-Compulsory Education, Institute of Education, University of London (2008)
- MA Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London (2007)
- BA Media Studies, University of Northampton (2005)
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