Research
Critical whiteness studies and US literature
My monograph on whiteness and citizenship in early US literature, titled 'Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction', came out in May 2021. This book employs the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ to examine fluid and precarious white citizenship in early nineteenth-century American fiction, from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb. It identifies and interrogates the repeated representation of white voices from the boundary between life and death: talking corpses, ghosts, ventriloquists, spiritualist mediums, monsters and non-human bodies. ‘Liminal whiteness’ explains this phenomenon. The book argues that in these transformative occurrences, the liminal figure’s voice—which is crucial in the construction of white identity—acts as an uncontainable and powerful articulation that questions, contests or negates early national and antebellum civic ideals. This project contributes to a growing body of critical whiteness scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the early US, and which resonates with contemporary discussions of white cultural anxiety and fragility.
Following this book project I am carrying out an longer term research project on racial transformation in 'postracial' US literature and culture after the election of Barack Obama, including film ('Get Out', 'Sorry to Bother You'), theatre ('Hamilton', 'An Octaroon'), and texts (Row, 'Your Face in Mine', Ruffin, 'We Cast a Shadow').
Race in colonial Australian literature
I have extended my research on racial transformation in the early US to discussions of race in colonial Australia. 'Speculating Race in Colonial Australia' is a book-length project that examines how colonial texts imagine race changing on both a demographic and individual level. Authors studied include Ernest Favenc, Marcus Clarke, Catherine Helen Spence, Charles Harpur and Charles Tompson. As part of this project I am also investigating the reception and adaptation of American ideas of race in colonial Australia, including responses to the circumatlantic slave trade.
From this project I have published an article on settler indignity in Ernest Favenc's gothic fiction, and have chapters under review on Favenc's poetry and Charles Harpur's racial ventriloquism.