I joined Strathclyde in 2024 as a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing, having previously held an Early Career Fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. I have a PhD in Literature and an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. My thesis, "Dream, Fantasy, and Illness: Exploring the Carnal Imaginary" considered carnal phenomenology and the sense of touch in modern and contemporary women's writing, looking at texts by Sally Rooney, Anaïs Nin, Mary Gaitskill, and Han Kang. I am currently researching embodied resistance in contemporary South Korean women's writing, alongside Korean feminist movements. More broadly, I am interested in depictions of the body and the carnal senses (touch, taste, smell) in modern and contemporary fiction, particularly the ways in which the body engenders and responds to socio-economic and political pressures.

My creative practice complements my critical research; my first novel, Interiors, published by the87press in 2022, picked up on many of the theoretical concerns of my research, particularly around embodied perception and the sense of touch. The novel, described by reviewer Vartika Rastogi as “a sensuous, embodied experience, one whose events made me feel like I, too, was implicated and altered by them, and where every turn of phrase felt like a beat in the time that I was living through”, shifts between the perspectives of three characters who are haunted by the ghost of a drowned man.

While I am predominantly a fiction writer I am interested in working across and bridging different disciplines and forms, including fiction, poetry, creative criticism, creative non-fiction, and collage. My short fiction and poetry have appeared in Ludd Gang, chewgulpspit, Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review, and my creative-critical response to Celine Song’s film Past Lives appeared in the Edinburgh International Film Festival-commissioned publication From Troubled Dreams Under a Glare of Sky (ed. Michael Pattison). My short piece of experimental prose poetry “Le Fou: On Touching, in four acts” was shortlisted for the July 2022 John Byrne Award. I was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence for Open Book Reading, an organization that runs creative writing workshops in Scotland.

I am currently working on a second novel, a literary thrilled titled In Residence.

My research interests include:

 

Creative Writing (Fiction)

20-21C Literature & Culture

Gender & Sexuality

20-21C Korean Literature

Marxist Theory

Queer Theory

 

I welcome applications from PhD students related to any of the above areas.