About

I’m a Scottish writer and academic. I’m currently based at Waseda University in Tokyo, where I am an Assistant Professor. Between 2017-2020, I was a Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, an institute of advanced study based at the Universty of Konstanz. I grew up in Edinburgh, and I studied Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies at the University of Glasgow, and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, before returning to Glasgow to take a PhD in 2016 on the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

I’m a modernist literature scholar and critical theorist. You can read about my current research on the theory of the Ideological Aesthetic here. Over the past two years I have been working on a book (nearing completion) which considers the confluence of technology, masculinity and fascism within English and European Modernist narratives. I am exploring these themes through a consideration of works by Wyndham Lewis, Louis Ferdinand Céline Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Julius Evola – among others. I’m also editor of the controversial political work Left Wings Over Europe, which will be a volume of the Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis forthcoming through Oxford University Press. My first monograph, Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic, was published by Peter Lang in 2017.

I played guitar, synthesizer and sang in the post-punk band Un Cadavre, and continue to record music and collaborate with musicians. Between 2014-2016 I made a series of three short films, with accompanying musical scores, based on the poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ by the Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

I published my first novel, Horizontal Rain, in August 2020 through Hyperidean Press, an independent literary press dedicated to experimental prose, which I co-founded.