Research
Personality, Group Behaviour, Emotional Intelligence, and Performance
I am interested in the interplay and manifestations of individual and social factors that transpire in a broad array of performance modalities. While research has historically focused on biological and genetic makeup and brain chemistry, I read the behavioural, group, and communicative elements. In my research, I examine personality, intelligence, non/adaptive behaviours, and grouping impact that lead to specific performance and performative attributes. I am focused on East-West performance narratives, historically mis/read by recourse to limited areas of narratology and narrative performance, resulting in individual and group prejudice about authenticity, identity, positioning, and belonging. Over the past decade, I have examined these factors in relation to ability and disability discourses across human communication, multimodal artefacts, and other varied performance.
The Narrative-Cognitive Spectrum
I examine textual indicators upon the meeting of mind/body narratives, spanning literature of the long nineteenth century (mainly focused on psycho-aesthetics of East-West performance encounters, literature, art, and history), philosophy of mind, philosophy of science (particularly the cognitive domain), and continental philosophy in relation to historical multimodalities, in addition to contemporary narratology. A major focus of my research has been the narrative-cognitive spectrum of pain; its literary history, theories, and wider impact on other fields interests me. I have previously delivered in research related to the interface between pain subjectivities and measured approaches, reading aesthetics of pain in relation to cognitive science. As such, my psycho-literary work is unique in the sense that it falls neither within the corpus followed by traditionalist literary critics nor that endorsed by contemporary radicals. In this area, I have previously worked on several co-edited volumes which are in waiting for publication.
Auto/Biographical Narratology and Otherness
Examining multiplicities of psychological, historical, structural, and performance paradigms (in auto/biographical narrative medialities) is my primary focus in the study of otherness, self-, and other-construction. To understand how cases of implicit bias, for instance, inform the structural content and/or transform textual and performance dynamics of content and behaviour is among my major multidisciplinary research interests. To decipher meanings (altered by or reconstructed by way of implicit/explicit bias cues) in relation to emotional intelligence requires certain methodological readings of narratives and human behaviour that interest me. This means in-depth engagement with the psychology of aesthetics, learning and teaching methodologies, exploring the diversity of aesthetic corpus in research when we think of historical othering processes. In this direction, I read neurolinguistics and psychology of othering processes. I have significantly contributed to varied projects in this area with a specific co-edited volume previously contracted and in waiting for publication.
Research collaborations
Dr Ian Schermbrucker
Together with Dr Schermbrucker, we read identity, conflict, and personality interrelationships. We collaborate on a book series with a few titles in waiting for publication after the pandemic to which a group of highly acclaimed international scholars contributed. Our collaborative work has over the years expanded to reflexivity and psychology of human difference, leader and performer behaviour, and conflict and resolution models in relation to personality and intelligence.
Primary and Secondary Care Professionals, NHS, Healthcare Management Bodies
Primary Care Narratives (2016-2021)
I was involved in a multi-speciality project, addressing primary care topics on patient and community care. I have collaborated with a diverse group of healthcare professionals, NHS professionals, Mental Health colleagues, secondary care consultants, and managerial as well as accounting & practice management experts and trainers. This project is previously accepted and contracted (2015-2016), currently in publication queue, and will be presented as a co-edited volume with extended journal papers once reaching publication turn in due course (2026 onwards).
Community Dance Groups
Oriental Dance & Variations (2019)
In 2019, I started a project on the significance of movement terminology and body-mind narratives. This project involved professional dance teachers, psychologists, and community dancers from around the globe who are practically engaged in the exercise of movement modalities. The project has seen a collaborative socio- and psycho-narratology based reading modelled on performative analytics with some articles that have already been published while other collaborative articles are in waiting for publication (2025 onwards).
Professor Josie Billington
Dementia-friendly book groups at the Care Home: Can quality of life be improved? (2019-2020)
We aimed to help people living with Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia to enjoy reading and sharing books. And we wanted to provide a meaningful social activity – a dementia-friendly book group - to help improve quality of life and sense of well-being at the care home.
School of Psychology & Pain Research Institute - Prof Andrej Stancak
Pain, a Psycho-Aesthetic Discourse from Renaissance Minds to Contemporary Narratives (2012-2021)
I worked closely with colleagues from the School of Literature and Psychology, mainly on topics surrounding pain for this project (2012-2021). We held several conferences and seminars from 2012 onwards, discussing various topics and shared experiences of both fields, and this culminated in a series of publications and projects.