NEW (25 September 2018): extensive list of earlier publications with full text links in most cases
I am Assistant Professor of English literature at Åbo Akademi University and adjunct professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, both in Finland. I have written or co-edited six books, most recently Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (Benjamins, 2016) and Literary Second Cities (co-edited, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
My current research focuses on the literary history of the London ‘slum’, and on mediations of the urbanity of British and US cities which boomed in the nineteenth century, including Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, St Louis and Memphis.
2018 publications include an article on E.M. Forster’s relations with T.S. Eliot (for E:Rea), a piece in Swedish (for IKAROS) on my 2017 visit to St Louis, MO, a book chapter on pedestrianism and George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (in Architectures of Hurry, edited by Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Richard Dennis and Deryck G. Holdsworth, published by Routledge in their ‘Research in Historical Geography’ series), an article about Gissing and the topographies of Lambeth, South London (for The Gissing Journal) plus book reviews in George Orwell Studies and the Polish Journal of English Studies.
My BA and MPhil degrees were gained at English departments in the UK during the 1990s (Birmingham and Oxford respectively). During PhD research at Åbo Akademi University in Finland in the 2000s I specialized in British modernism, writing a thesis also published as a book: E.M. Forster and English Place: A Literary Topography (full text). From 2012-15 I was an Academy of Finland postdoctoral research fellow, my project entitled ‘The Discursive Construction of the “London Slum” 1820-1960: A Literary History’. That project had its own research blog. I have been a visiting scholar at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (2013-14) and the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London (2014).
As well as my job in the department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University and docentship in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, I am a founder member and currently (2018-20) President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS).