Staff profile
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies |
Biography
I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. I specialise in twentieth-century literature and culture, with a focus on modernism, drama, poetry, and dance.
I completed my BA in English literature at Barnard College of Columbia University, before moving to the University of Oxford to undertake an MSt and a funded DPhil in English. My DPhil thesis was awarded the 2022 Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize, for best thesis examined in the Oxford English Faculty. Prior to joining Durham in 2024, I held a two-year lectureship at Cardiff University.
Research
My first monograph, Modernism After the Ballets Russes: Movement in the British Theatre, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025. It demonstrates how Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes gave rise to new ways of writing, thinking about, and staging drama in early twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it recovers a previously neglected strand of modernism: one that saw the dramatic power of the moving body expand the expressive possibilities of the period’s theatrical arts.
My current project, ‘Dance and the Making of Modern Poetic Drama’, is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. This research draws on newly available archival material to explore how dance and modern verse drama were mutually constituted. Central figures in this study include dancer and theatre director Rupert Doone and the remarkable range of modernist poets with whom he collaborated, such as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Louis MacNeice.
Publications
Book review
Journal Article