I completed my PhD in English Literature at the University of Ottawa and I held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University before I joined the department of English at the University of British Columbia. I focus on war and conflict in my interdisciplinary research and teaching on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, attending to the shifting frameworks at stake in individual and collective understandings of the past. In particular, I specialize in the study of the cultural transmission and reception of the First World War (1914-1918) in modern and contemporary British literature. The interrelated problems of testimony and history, trauma and mourning, and memory and heritage are central to my scholarship. Currently, I am investigating Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in the aftermath of international hostilities as well as the intergenerational legacies of the First World War in British culture and society.

Virginia Woolf: Jacob’s Room (1922); Mrs. Dalloway (1925); To the Lighthouse (1927); The Years (1937); Three Guineas (1938). Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War. Ed. Ralf Schneider and Jane Potter. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Forthcoming.

The New Great War Novels: Revisiting the War’s Myths through Contemporary Fictions. Teaching Representations of the First World War. Ed. Debra Rae Cohen and Douglas Higbee. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2017. 265-76.

Dis/composing the First World War in Britain: Trauma and Commemoration in the Testimony of Harry Patch, 1998-2008. History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past 28.1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 71-109.

Working Through the Working-Class War: The Battle of the Somme in Contemporary British Literature by Alan Sillitoe and Ted Hughes. The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Ed. Martin Löschnigg and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 59-79.

The Loss of Living Memory: The Cultural Reception of Harry Patch (2008-2009), The Last British Veteran of the First World War. Conflicted Pasts and National Identities: Composing Narratives of War and Division. Ed. Michael Böss. Aarhus, DK: Aarhus UP, 2014. 94-112.

Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Old Shoes: A Cross-Cultural Iconography of Historical Trauma from the Great War to the Iraq War. Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers From the Twenty-Second Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Ann Martin and Kathryn Holland. Clemson, SC: Clemson UP; Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. 50-56.

Circling the Cenotaph: Mrs. Dalloway, Historical Trauma, and the Archive. Approaches to Teaching Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Ed. Eileen Barrett and Ruth O. Saxton. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009. 58-63.

Born in the Year 1919: Doris Lessing, the First World War, and the Children of Violence. Trauma in Doris Lessing’s Work. Ed. Suzette Henke and Jeanie E. Warnock. Doris Lessing Studies 27.1 & 2 (Winter-Spring 2008): 3-10.

D.H. Lawrence, Collective Mourning, and Cultural Reconstruction after World War I. Modernism and Mourning. Ed. Patricia Rae. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP; Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 2007. 198-212.

The Return of the Aura: Contemporary Writers Look Back at the First World War Photograph. Locating Memory: Photographic Acts. Ed. Annette Kuhn and Kirsten McAllister. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. 113-34.

I highlight comparative, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and transgenerational approaches to conflict and culture in my undergraduate and graduate classes on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. I have taught courses on First World War poetry and prose from Britain, America, Canada, and Ireland; the contested legacies of the First World War and the Easter Rising in Britain and Ireland; landmark Anglo-American novels published between the World Wars; theories of trauma in relation to the First World War, the Holocaust, and transatlantic slavery; contemporary Canadian rewritings of the First World War; and the multigenerational reception of the First World War in British culture.

I have supervised BA Honours theses and MA and PhD projects on diverse materials ranging from modernist experimental writing to the contemporary graphic novel, in historical contexts spanning from the First World War to 9/11, on critical issues such as loss and reconstruction, ritual and liminality, and spectacle and revolt.