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 recurrently and at length 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, Vita Sackville-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 four current projects that revisit and extend 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 is a chapter titled "Writing About War" for a Routledge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro. This piece will complement and develop some aspects of my previous work on Ishiguro, which includes a book in the Continuum Contemporaries series (2001) and articles in Modern Fiction Studies (US, 2021) and Foreign Literature Studies (China, 2022).  

A fourth project, or constellation of projects, originates in my book A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (Oxford UP, 2011), which included a long chapter on mediatized terrorism in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent and 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 there, I published an article on Erskine Childers's spy novel The Riddle of the Sands in Cusp (2023) and am contributing a chapter on Len Deighton to a forthcoming Cambridge UP collection on literary conservatism.  My guest-edited special issue on (in)security for South Atlantic Review was published online in March 2026.  I am now editing The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré.

I am also actively involved in D. H. Lawrence studies, teaching, writing and presenting regularly on his work and chairing the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences (CCILC) for 2025-28.  I served as president of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America in 2021-23; co-organized the 2025 CCILC Lawrence conference in Mexico City; and serve on the editorial advisory board of the D. H. Lawrence Review.  In other service to the profession at large, I sit on the advisory boards of Modern Fiction Studies and Victorians Institute Journal and am a past president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA).

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the 20th-Century British and Irish novel, spy fiction, 21st-Century British fiction, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.  My most recent graduate seminar studied Joyce; the next (Fall 2026) will approach Lawrence as an international writer.