School of Advanced Study, University of London

Faculty Member, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies

Visiting Research Fellow

About

I am a lecturer in Visual Culture teaching history of art and design at Middlesex University and Queen Mary. I am also currently visiting research fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies.
My research interests lie in 20th and 21st century visual and literary culture. I'm currently writing a monograph on the obsession with speed and the fascination with the car and car crashes in Western culture since 1900 (forthcoming with Peter Lang, 2012). I am also co-editing a collection of essays on perceptions of death since 1900 (forthcoming with Berghahn, 2013) and a collection of essays on Alternative Worlds. The latter reflects my new long-term research project which explores the afterlives of the utopias of modernism, in particular the project of Atlantropa and its curious mixture of fiction, myth, and scientific and technological fact.
I have published on urban space, cinematic architecture, the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena as well as society’s fascination with death and murder.
I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on twentieth-century visual culture, cultural memory, and literary and cultural studies. Several of these have explored alternative methods of learning and assessment (i.e. team-work, project-based learning and the active mixing of theory and art practice).
Apart from my academic career, I also work as a curator for video and performance art, and occasionally produce creative work myself. I am founding director of the international short film competition and archive Betting on Shorts (www.bettingonshorts.com) and, together with the artist Sam Treadaway run the artbook project Revolve:R.