Academic
- Professor of Digital Narratives, University of the West of England, Bristol
- Fellow, Royal Society of Arts
Research areas
- Expanded narrative and transmedia practice
- Landscape, place, and spatial poetics
- Artists' books and print culture
- The vernacular image and folk traditions
- Digital and hybrid publication forms
Research
My research sits at the intersection of studio practice and critical inquiry. The central questions concern how narrative operates in and through material form — how a book, a print, a sequence of images can produce meaning that exceeds what any single medium could carry alone.
Current research develops across two overlapping strands: a practice-based investigation of landscape as a site of cultural pressure (ongoing since 2018), and a theoretical engagement with expanded notions of narrative that draws on transmedia studies, book arts, and the philosophy of place.
Previous funded research includes Threnody (Arts Council England, 2017), an investigation of grief and memorial practice through artists’ books; and The Reader in the Story (AHRC, 2014–16), a collaborative project examining reader agency in digital and hybrid narrative forms.
Publications
Books
- The Unfinished Book About What We Found There (Uniform Books, 2022)
- Narrative at the Edge of the Digital (MIT Press, 2019) — co-authored with James Pope
- Fictional Worlds, Narrative Spaces (Routledge, 2016)
Selected essays and chapters
- ‘The Edgeland as Archive: Folk Horror and Landscape Memory’ in British Folk Horror: New Perspectives, ed. Adam Scovell (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
- ‘Making Books That Think’ in Artists’ Books Now, ed. Sarah Bodman (Intellect, 2022)
- ‘Transmedia Narrative and the Question of Authorship’, Journal of Media Practice 21(2), 2020
- ‘What the Vernacular Knows’, Visual Culture in Britain 18(3), 2017
Teaching
University of the West of England, Bristol
MA Digital Narratives — Programme Lead
Cross-disciplinary postgraduate programme exploring the theory and practice of narrative across digital, print, and hybrid forms.
BA Fine Art — Contributing lecturer
Studio practice seminars and critical studies modules covering landscape, place, and contemporary British art.
Research Methods (Postgraduate) — Module leader
Practice-based research methodologies, philosophical frameworks for artistic research, and writing for academic and public contexts.
Supervision
Currently supervising doctoral students working on: expanded artists’ book practice; folk horror as aesthetic category; place-writing and landscape phenomenology.
Talks and invited lectures
- ‘The Book as Argument’ — Tate Modern, London, 2023
- ‘Landscape, Pressure, and the Vernacular Image’ — Camden Arts Centre, 2022
- ‘Narrative After the Network’ — dConstruct, Brighton, 2019
- ‘Reading the Edgeland’ — Hay Festival, 2018