I currently supervise postgraduate research students working on Beckett,
film theory and value, queer cinema, Gothic writing, theories of parody
and pastiche, Blanchot and Rhys and contemporary music culture. I am always
keen to see proposals from prospective PhD students, wishing to work on
topics in nineteenth- or twentieth-century literature and culture, on interdisciplinary
topics or topics in cultural history, including the specific areas of my
own current research (see below).
These are my publications .
My current work is a cultural phenomenology of skin .
The War in Truth . This is the text of a paper given at a colloquium entitled Postmodernism and Truth, held at the University of Sunderland in November 1993.
Some of My Best Friends Are Philosemites . This discusses the relations between philosemitism and antisemitism, with particular reference to Joyce and Beckett.
Family Time . This was first given as a paper at the `Who Stole the Family Values?' conference, May 11, 1996, at Birkbeck College, London.
Scribbledehobbles: Writing Jewish-Irish Feet . A paper given at the 'Culture, Modernity and "the Jew" ' conference, Institute of English Studies , 1995.
Noise . This is a series of 5 programmes which I wrote and presented on BBC Radio 3. The programmes were produced by Tim Dee and transmitted February 24-28th, 1997. You can listen to programmes 1-3 (26 mins) and 4-5 (20 mins) in Realplayer format.
Beckett and Bion . This was given at the Beckett and London conference held at Goldsmiths College, London in 1997.
`Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear' . This was written for and given at the conference on Science and Culture 1780-1900 , organised by my colleagues Roger Luckhurst and Jo McDonagh and held at Birkbeck College on 12 September 1997.
Romanticism, Modernity and Biography . This the text of a talk broadcast as BBC Radio 3's `Book of the Month', October 28th, 1997.
A Few Don'ts By A Cultural Phenomenologist . This is an uneasy manifesto for the kind of work I would like to be doing and would like to see more of in cultural studies.
History in Bits . This is an expanded version of a paper that was given at the conference After the New Historicism, organised by Steve Clark for the Centre for English Studies, and held at the Clore Centre, Birkbeck College, 13-14 March 1998.
Art, Criticism and Laughter . This is the text of a paper given at a conference devoted to the work of Terry Eagleton held in Oxford and organised by the Raymond Williams Trust in March 1998.
Towards a New Demonology . This is the text of a paper given at the Becoming Human conference mounted at Birkbeck College by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture and the Humanities on September 25, 1998.
Slow Going . This is the text of a paper given at the Critical Beckett conference held in Birmingham on 26 September 1998. It has been published in print form in Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000): 153-65.
What If There Were No Such Thing As The Aesthetic? An unhelpful contribution, given on March 3rd, 1999, to a seminar programme called The Function of Contemporary Aesthetics, organised by John Armstrong for the Centre for English Studies and the University of London Philosophy Programme.
Modernism and the Writing Hand : an amplified version of a paper given at the Modernism and the Technology of Writing conference. organised by Tim Armstrong in the Institute of English Studies , March 26, 1999.
Michel Serres's Five Senses : the text of a paper given at the Michel Serres conference on May 29th 1999.
Beside Himself: Glenn Gould and the Prospects of Performance : a talk broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 4 November 1999 as part of an evening exploring the life and work of Glenn Gould.
Violence, Victims and Gender . An occasional aimed at The Guardian - and missing.
Remarks on Contemporary Music and Listening , Interview extracts broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3's Settling the Score series and reprinted in Settling the Score: A Journey Through Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Michael Oliver (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).
Rough Magic . A series of radio essays exploring the mysteries of everyday objects (bags, wires, screens, sweets), broadcast by BBC Radio 4, January-February 2000. You can listen in Realplayer format to programmes 1 and 2, Bags and Wires , and programmes 3 and 4, Screens and Sweets .
Shifting Ground . English version of 'Auf schwankendem Boden', written for the exhibition catalogue , Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2000), pp. 80-7.
Sounding Out Film , a much expanded version of a paper given at the conference on Literature, Film and Modernity, 1880-1940 organised jointly by the Institute for English Studies , the University of Sussex and the University of Birmingham in London, January 13-15th 2000..
Soul Subtlety , a review talk centring on Daniel Pick's Svengali's Web, broadcast as BBC Radio 3's Book of the Month, 9 March 2000.
The Shakes . A piece of writing that resulted from an invitation to speak at the Research Seminar of the Roehampton Institute Department of Drama, 30 March 2000.
‘A Door Half Open To Surprise’: Charles Madge’s Imminence : a paper given at the Charles Madge and Mass Observation conference held at the University of Sussex, May 12th, 2000.
Destitution . A lecture given at the Metaphors of Economy conference, University of East Anglia, 23 June 2000.
Repression, or, The Back-Pedal Brake : the text of a talk broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on July 1, 2000.
Weird Science : the expanded text of a paper given at the Remembering the 90s conference, Birkbeck College, 8 September, 2000.
Consequential Ground: The Foot Passengers of Bleak House : a lecture given at the Bleak House Day held at Birkbeck College, 30 September 2000.
Isaac Rosenberg: Birkbeck's War Poet . A lecture given as part of Birkbeck College's Mechanics to Millennium series, 30 October, 2000.
Seeing Feelingly . Introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Peter Randall- Page: New Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, organised by the Djanogly Art Gallery , Nottingham, 13 January - 25 February 2001.
As Entomate as Intimate Could Pinchably Be
.
The Shame of Being a Man
. A paper given as part of the Gender and Sexuality seminar series,
University of London, 30 November 2000.
An Airmail From the Monster . A text broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves, 31 January 2001, to mark the 150th anniversay of Mary Shelley's death.
Life Writing . An extended review of Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), broadcast as Radio 3's Book of the Month, Wednesday 21 March 2001.
Flat Life . This paper was first given at the University of Glasgow in March 2001.
Edison's Teeth: Touching Hearing . This paper was written for the conference 'Hearing Culture', a conference organised by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and scheduled to take place in Morelia, Mexico, October 4-12th 2001. The conference was postponed in the aftermath of the September 11th attack on New York.
The Law of Marks . This paper forms part of the book I am currently writing on the historical poetics of skin, and was given at the Birkbeck School of Law Research Seminar 21st November 2001.
A Skin That Walks . This paper was given at Royal Holloway University of London, February 13, 2002.
Watching the Birdie . These comments were written in response to the Wooster Group's production of To You, The Birdie (Phèdre), at the Riverside Studios in May 2002, for a symposium on the work of the Wooster Group at the Cochrane Theatre London, 14-15 May 2002, organised by Andrew Quick and Adrian Streathfield.
Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought . A paper written for the 'Literature and Science' conference in Ascoli Piceno, 20-22 May 2002.
Isobel Armstrong's Material Imagination . A paper given at the conference ‘Radical Aesthetics: The Work of Isobel Armstrong’, organised by the Institute for English Studies by Anne Janowitz, Sally Ledger, Jo McDonagh and Laura Marcus on 21st June 2002.
Michel Serres's Milieux . An extended version of a paper given at the ABRALIC (Brazilian Association for Comparative Literature) conference on ‘Mediations’, Belo Horizonte, July 23-26 2002.
Oxygen Debt: Little Dorrit's Pneumatics . Paper given at the Birkbeck Little Dorrit Day , 28 September 2002.