About

I research and write about the art, literature, and political life of the first half of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on European countries in the inter-war period.

I have two ongoing projects.  The first of these is a study of the ways in which the art and architecture of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds was appropriated by the totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany.  The second is a project devoted to the fate of writers and artists in the USSR in the years after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.

My work has appeared in a range of platforms, including The New York Review of Books, The Modernist, and The Conversation. I contribute regularly to Russian Art & Culture and the blog for Pushkin House, the centre for Russian culture in London.

My academic bakcground is in the literature of the twentieth century, particularly the poetry and prose of the Modernist period (c.1910 – 1950). I have published widely on the literature of travel and national identity in 1930s England, and my doctoral dissertation was a study of the work of T. S. Eliot; I received my PhD in English Literature from the University of Durham.

I divide my time between East Sussex (UK) and Paris.

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