Researcher Summary
My research encompasses several fields in contemporary and historical culture and literature, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Theory, with a particular focus on analysis of Cultural Contact, Globalization and Displacement; Non-fiction Literary Genres; Science Fiction; and Cultural Studies. I have published on several British writers, including Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, John Fowles, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro; on Canadian-Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje; on neurologist and popular science writer Oliver Sacks; on Ursula K. Le Guin; on travel writing in colonial and postcolonial contexts; and on speculative fiction.
I am currently working on a book-length study of texts representing different modes of travel and displacement in the late twentieth-century, another on Michael Ondaatje's play between fictional and nonfiction prose writing, and another on the re-emergence of utopia as a feature of late C20 and early C21 speculative fiction. My other current research ranges from a focus on The Black Jacobins, CLR James' accounts of the Haitian Revolution; research on recent Palagi publications in the Pacific; looking into the experimental social visions of Iain (M) Banks and Ursula Le Guin's science fiction; and the writing up of loss and memory in Joan Didion's recent work.
My teaching and supervision matches these research areas: postcolonial and contemporary literature, creative nonfiction, and science fiction and utopian texts.
