My work focuses on the relationships between literature, communities, and universities. My role was inherited from the University's former Extra-Mural Studies Department.

My current interests are in dangerous books; questions about who universities are for, wider access to education, and adult education; the future of universities, including in times of climate crisis; and the relationships between literary works and radical pedagogy (especially Paulo Freire). In my literary work, I have published on George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and Palestinian literature. I also write creative non-fiction and poetry.

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.

I am also writing about how universities can be re-made in an era of climate change, for a forthcoming essay collection What are universities for?, based on a keynote lecture at a conference of the same name at the University of Regina in May 2023.

I recently completed a narrative non-fiction book about inheritance and reinvention, focusing especially on the family ghosts we all carry. The book blends personal narrative, family history, and reflections on a reading group I led at Ideal Community Action (a charity than ran in Bristol until 2020) for people in recovery. I was promoted to Professor in 2017 and my inaugural lecture, Reading Seamus Heaney in Barton Hill: Literature, communities, universities, in 2019, also draws on my work with Ideal.

All of my work connects teaching, writing, and practice. For example, my thinking about the future of universities is informed by my roles as academic lead for engagement for Bristol’s new Temple Quarter campus and as chief academic officer for Black Mountains College, where I led the design of a new interdisciplinary degree programme (see below). The Companion I am working on draws on an undergraduate unit I designed in 2013 on Dangerous Books.

Lifelong learning

I designed the part-time BA in English Literature and Community Engagement (ELCE) which launched in 2008 and, with Richard Pettigrew, the Foundation in Arts and Social Sciences (CertHE), which has been running since 2013. Both programmes have expanded radically who can access an undergraduate at degree at Bristol, as no prior qualifications are required on entry, with strong recruitment among mature students, those from communities where participation is lowest (especially in the city-region), with disabilities, from a global majority background, and who are first in their family to attend university.

I have also designed many short adult education courses, including with partner organisations working with migrant communities, single parents, and communities affected by addiction or involved in the criminal justice system. I was course director for the part-time Diploma in Creative Writing from 2004 to 2010.

Civic engagement

I am academic lead for engagement for the new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, where I am leading a major programme that resets the University's relationships with local communities and its civic mission. Key initiatives have included:

• Changing how the university works with partners, including by designing unique civic spaces in the building, such as the Bristol Rooms (a large co-working space for civic and community partners) and the Story Exchange (a round space for conversations between people with different experiences and expertise).
• Changing where the university works by leading the creation of a micro-campus with partners at the Wellspring Settlement in Barton Hill in 2020 and a second micro-campus at the Gatehouse Centre in Hartcliffe (from 2025); this gives the university a presence in 2 of the 3 communities in the city with among the lowest rates of participation in HE in the UK.
• Changing who is part of the university community, including via multiple initiatives with colleagues in HR, such as JOIN US! (a programme of activities with partners to recruit staff to the university from local communities); a new target of 1% of the workforce as apprentices; and significant levy share in the city-region, creating 89 apprenticheships within around 36 small or medium-sized organisations (SMEs).

Writing

I am author of Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, a memoir about a semester I spent teaching at Al-Quds University, 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 (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 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. I've published a poem in Raceme and four poems in the Oxford Magazine.

Teaching interests

I teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose writing and study skills courses for adult learners, among other topics. I have taught an undergraduate course on Dangerous Books since 2013 and recently taught a course that considered nineteenth-century prose writing, both fiction and non-fiction (Dickens, Eliot, Darwin, Mayhew, Hazlitt and more).

I've given undergraduate lectures on a wide range of topics including the question of what surprises us as readers in Shakespeare's sonnets; violence in Romeo and Juliet in Palestine; curiosity in Jane Austen; the passion of Mansfield Park; poetry and story; revisions in poetry; scenes of reading and writing in Virginia Woolf's novels; and American Jewish fiction. 

Other interests and external roles

Alongside my work at Bristol, I am chief academic officer for Black Mountains College, a new college in Talgarth that is dedicated to reimagining education at a time of ecological crisis. I have led the creation of a new undergraduate degree at BMC, in Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology, and Systems Change and contribute to the strategic leadership of the College, including its rapidly expanding further education courses (in topics such as nature restoration, horticulture, coppicing, and agroecology) and public education programme. I have been an external examiner for programmes at Birkbeck (2016 to 2020) and Gloucestershire (2015 to 2019).

I am a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. I was co-editor of The Brodie Press from 2002 to 2015; our books included two poetry collections by Julie-ann Rowell, recognised by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Prize respectively.