A specialist in twentieth-century British, Irish and American literature, I also have interests in the literature of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and in the longer history of writing in English.

My most recent book, Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines literary responses to the aristocracy between the world wars.  With detailed attention to nuances of form and expression, as well as to literary and historical contexts, Monsters describes and analyzes the mixed feelings invoked and explored by modern writers responding to the historical reality of the British aristocracy's decline and partial survival.  The authors considered at length and recurrently are Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Edith Wharton.  The book also features brief analyses of T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, W. B. Yeats, and Edward St. Aubyn.  As an epilogue to this book, I am currently working on a study of particularity in James Joyce that attempts to answer the question "What would a Joyce chapter look like?" if the book had been conceived and structured in a more orthodox, author-by-author fashion.  

The Joyce study is one of three current projects that revisits or extends earlier work.  The second of these returns to the subject of my first book, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (Oxford UP, 1996).  In a new chapter on censorship and publishing for The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modernism and War (forthcoming), I explore the intertwined literary and legal consequences of war and war-time for Joyce, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, and for their editors, publishers, censors, and readers.  

A third ongoing project, or constellation of projects, originates in my 2011 book, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford UP), which included a long chapter on mediatized terrorism in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent and, more briefly, in fiction by Wells, Ford, and Woolf, as well as an epilogue on Elizabeth Bowen's war-time spy novel The Heat of the Day.  Extending the longstanding interests in shock, terror, and security expressed in those chapters, I published an article on Erskine Childers's spy novel The Riddle of the Sands in Cusp (2023) and am currently writing on Len Deighton for a forthcoming Cambridge UP collection on literary conservatism.  My guest-edited special issue on (in)security for South Atlantic Review will go live in March 2026.  I am now editing The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré.

In other work, I have written on Kazuo Ishiguro, contributing a book to the Continuum Contemporaries series (2001) and publishing articles in Modern Fiction Studies (2021) and the Chinese journal Foreign Literature Studies (2022). 

I sit on the editorial advisory boards of Modern Fiction Studies, Victorians Institute Journal and D.H. Lawrence Review. I am a past president of both the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) and the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. I co-organized the Lawrence conference in Mexico City in 2025 and now chair the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences (CCILC) for 2025-28. 

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British and Irish novel, spy fiction, 21st-Century British fiction, and James Joyce.  I regularly offer first-year undergraduate seminars, most recently on Lawrence's poetry.  My most recent graduate seminar studied Joyce; the next (Fall 2026) will approach Lawrence as an international writer.