University of York

Faculty Member, English and Related Literature

Teaching Fellow

Thesis Title: "Freedom and the City: Urban Culture in British Fiction After Thatcher"

About

I am currently a Teaching Fellow at the University of York, UK, where I completed my PhD in the English department. I have previous degrees in English (BA hons., Exeter) and Modern Literature and Culture (MA, York). I have research interests in post-war British literature, film and television; Thatcherism and the politics of culture; neoliberalism, political theory and the contemporary novel; and the recent history of the British Left. In my doctoral thesis, “Freedom and the City: Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement”, I mobilise the political thought of Hannah Arendt in order to argue that key fictions of the post-Thatcher period represent a sustained interrogation of a tendency of the cultural Left to elevate disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle. This tendency emerged in the work of thinkers such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy as part of a strategic response to the radicalism of the New Right during the 1980s, but I argue that a close reading of contemporary British literature reveals it to have led to a steady abandonment of politics in its formal sense, and has severely compromised the tenability of urban culture as site of progressive praxis. The thesis includes reappraisals of key contemporary British novelists including Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Maggie Gee.