Senior Lecturer in English/Film and Television, Manchester Metropolitan University
I am a Senior Lecturer in English and Film and Television specialising in landscape/place writing and programmes. Other publications look at national identity and rambling in Edwardian fiction, new nature writing, history on television, and class in the works of Agatha Christie.
My research to date has focused on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the lower-middle-class clerk. I am particularly interested in the fictional representations of clerks in literature from the late-Victorian period until the present day. I also write about the influence of the English landscape on the constructions of lower-middle-class masculinities, as well as the impact that the growth of suburbia had on this particular identity. As part of this fascination with the clerk and other office workers, I have become involved in discussions of middlebrow fiction and the role that intellectual snobbery plays on the understanding of various forms of writing.
More recently, I have begun to indulge a life-long enjoyment of detective fiction by examining the place of the clerk within the works of Agatha Christie. I am also beginning new research projects on 'landscape programming' within contemporary television, and 'new nature writing' - exploring the commonalities between them as well as the relationship between current and past representations of place.
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