Research Interests

My first monograph was entitled Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2000). In this book I considered how the figure of the orphan had a supplementary function and thus unsettled notions of belonging in both family and nation in Victorian culture. I considered a range of writing from novels, popular tracts, cultural discourses, and historical material alongside actual emigration schemes in order to understand how the orphan figure became a scapegoat figure both threatening to, and actually produced by, the family.

I still maintain an interest in the concept of the orphan and its popularity in post-colonial writing as a vehicle through which identity formation is enacted.

My current research project is on race and racial theory in nineteenth and twentieth-century writing and theory. I am currently co-editing a reader on race with Prof. David Theo Goldberg and Prof. Tommy Lott. This reader is primarily a collection of archival material on race and will be published in 2003 with Blackwell.

I am also contracted to do a monograph entitled Dickens and Race with Manchester University Press, 2004. This book will situate Charles Dickens and his writing within the context of nineteenth-century discourses on race and foreigness. The primary aim will be to show how Dickens both translates and contributes to nineteenth-century thinking about race in his fiction, letters and journalism. More specifically, the book will consider various changing cultural contexts in order to explain the shift in Dickens's thinking about race as primarily an exotic site of fantasy largely drawn from his favourite childhood bedtime stories, 'Tales of the Arabian Nights', to that of a demonic savagery after the events of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865. Throughout his writing Dickens does return to issues of race, empire and different cultures ? cf., Bleak House, Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood? relying on them for a commentary on the situation at home, escape routes, exoticism, and intrigue.

Teaching Interests

I have a wide range of teaching experience in primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I currently teach courses on Dickens, Mid-Victorian Literature, Colonial Writing and Post-Colonial Writing. In future I will also be offering courses on Writing by Contemporary Women of Colour and Contemporary Canadian Writing.

This year I taught the autobiography section on the core course for the MA in Women, Gender, Writing.

I would particularly welcome applications for students wishing to do PhD work on any of the specific areas that I have published on and from students generally who wish to do work on Victorian literature and culture, post-colonial writing, writing and race.