My current role is as Academic Director for Civic Spaces, leading the design and implementation of public-facing and collaborative spaces at the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus and the associated micro-campuses in Barton Hill and Hartcliffe and Withywood. These spaces house a full range of university activities and re-imagine the university as a purposeful actor on shared challenges with a full range of partners and within communities where it has traditionally been invisible. Our work in Hartcliffe includes the design of a new micro-qualification, alongside community partners and employers, funded by the Office for Students.

Alongside this role, I am leading a Policy Bristol funded project, working with the Department for Education (DfE) on addressing cold spots in higher education. I sit on a task-and-finish group with DfE on access and participation, due to report in 2027.

Outside of my work at Bristol, I am chief academic advisor for Black Mountains College in Wales, which combines further, higher, and public education programmes dedicated to a time of climate emergency. I have also held visiting positions at Al-Quds University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Lancaster University. I was a founder and co-editor of The Brodie Press, a small poetry publisher, from 2002 to 2015.

I have a long-standing interest in lifelong learning and in widening participation. I have designed and led many programmes, including a part-time degree, foundation programmes, and over 500 short courses.

I am author of Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, a memoir about a semester I spent teaching in the West Bank, which was reviewed in The Observer and received praise from writers as diverse as John Berger, Helen Dunmore and Ahdaf Soueif. I'm co-author of Who are universities for?, which makes the case for a university sector in which all of society participates and which received praise from David Lammy MP and Tim Blackman, the former VC of the Open University. It's been reviewed in the LSE Review of Books.

Romeo and Juliet in Palestine was published in an Arabic translation in 2021 by the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and Al-Raqamiya; the translation is by students at An-Najah University.

I'm co-editor of Doris Lessing and the Forming of History. I am currently editing the Routledge Companion to Dangerous Books, with Emma Crowley, which will bring together 50 contributors to provide the first, interdisciplinary survey of the reading, writing, and teaching of radical literature (and of literature made radical under duress) and its dual role as a site of refuge and place of dissent. It is inspired by an undergraduate course on this topic which I set up in 2013.

I also write long reads, features, books reviews, and comment pieces for publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books; see my personal website.