I study how novels think with the law.
About
I work on modernist and contemporary global Anglophone literature (non-US), focusing on how fiction engages legal history to rethink rights, recognition, and justice. Before graduate study I practiced law in Australia, and I bring legal rhetoric and archival methods to literary criticism and teaching in the legal humanities.
Current keywords: Modernism • Post-1945 Anglophone (non-US) • History & Theory of the Novel • Law, Media, and Literature • Critical Race & Settler-Colonial Studies • Science, Technology, and the Humanities.
News
- 2025 Distinguished Fellow, Harry Ransom Center — chapter on Sam Selvon’s Windrush novels and the racialized “color bar.”
- 2025 Essay on Gerald Murnane’s Terra Nullius forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies.
- 2025 Contribution in special issue of the European Journal of English Studies (Law & Literature / global Anglophone).
- under review “Is the Novelist Entitled to History? Fraudulence and Form in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud” at Textual Practice.
Research
Dissertation: Entitlement: How the Modern Novel Thinks Right. The project intervenes in modernist, postcolonial, and novel-theoretical debates to show how formal experiment responds to—and helps shape—moments of legal transformation across Britain and its empire. I develop “entitlement” as a method for reading how novels register expansions and contractions of legal personhood—from E. M. Forster to Zadie Smith (with Mulk Raj Anand, Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, and Yaa Gyasi). Chapters align literary form with legal regimes of caste/class, gender/suffrage, racialized migration, and historical memory; the Selvon chapter reads dialect and plotlessness against case law and critical race theory to trace the “color bar.”
Second book: Declarative Modernism: Aesthetic Rights, Autonomous Subjects, and the Novel of International Law. This project tracks Anglophone literature and film between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), asking across these declarations: who—or what—is entitled to rights? The inquiry extends to emerging debates about artificial and corporate “intelligence,” where questions of recognition, ownership, and obligation return in new technical and legal forms.
Publications & Work in Progress
- “Gerald Murnane’s Terra Nullius” — forthcoming, Modern Fiction Studies.
- Essay in the special issue of the European Journal of English Studies (2025).
- “Is the Novelist Entitled to History? Fraudulence and Form in Zadie Smith’s The Fraud” — under review at Textual Practice.
- Articles in/on the modern novel, law & literature, and global Anglophone appearing/forthcoming in venues including the Journal of Modern Literature.
- Assistant Editor, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction.
Digital Humanities & Open Infrastructure
- Contributor, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon; Frankenstein Variorum Project.
- Free Linux Initiative (with Lachlan Kermode): Typst-based, open-source workflows for scholarly communication; developing lightweight technical literacies for humanists.
- Interests: multimodal literacy; open access; editorial infrastructures; reproducible research for literary studies.
Teaching
My teaching is grounded in equity and inclusion, shaped by earlier legal work on Indigenous rights and native title. Courses connect literature and film with legal history, political theory, and lived experience; recent syllabi assign works such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, and Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius. I emphasize collaborative, multimodal learning and high-impact practices (archival work, public-facing projects).
- Foundations: Post-1945 Anglophone (non-US); Global Modernism; History & Theory of the Novel
- Topics: The Novel & the Law; Empire, Literature, and Historical Memory; Human Rights, Migration, and the Modern Novel
- Writing: Academic writing in the humanities; rhetoric and documentary archives
- Mentoring: I regularly advise students exploring graduate study.
Talks & Service
- Co-Chair, Victorian and Modernist Studies group (Brown).
- Organizer, symposia featuring Jed Esty and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.
- Organizing Committee, Association for Law, Culture & the Humanities.
- Secretary, American Association for Australasian Literary Studies.
Contact
Email: [email protected]