Scholarly Activity
Scholarly Activity
I was called as a barrister at the Honourable Society of Middle Temple in 1997, specialising in both Criminal and Family law at the Inns of Court School of Law, Gray’s Inn Place, London. At present, I am a registered university teacher at the University of Plymouth, and a part-time lecturer in Contextual Studies and the Dissertation module at the University Centre Cornwall College.
I hold a Post-Graduate Diploma in Law from the University of Westminster, a Master’s Degree in English Studies from the University of Exeter, and I received a Ph.D. from the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth. My doctoral research focussed on how Virginia Woolf’s fictions theorise the abundance of detail overflowing the thing we call “normal” consciousness. The flux of information that might otherwise remain merely marginal, fleeting, and unfolding in the world is (I argue) provided with a central position in Woolf’s novels and so brings forth the cognitive value of art.
Virginia Woolf's Microgenesis: Mental States and Conceptual Worlds.
As part of the Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature Series, I am under contract with Taylor & Francis to write a monograph, presently titled Virginia Woolf’s Microgenesis: Mental States and Conceptual Worlds. Virginia Woolf is a theorist; she is a theorist of an overarching modality of “wholeness” which precedes, and threatens to become, the “unendurable fragments” of “the disconnected and incoherent”; she is a theorist who advances a “discovery” of “dig[ging] out” and “shall connect” what “comes to daylight,” a “tunnelling process,” then, but one which emanates not “consciously” from the “mind” but from the manner in which “one touches the hidden spring”; Woolf is a theorist of the modality of the “transmuting process,” an intervening process caught inexplicably between the temporality of an “actual event” and its “differen[ce]”; she is a theorist of the internal question of life “as very solid” (exclusion of teleology) before it is “very shifting” (inclusion of teleology) and/or vice versa, that is, as a matter (or otherwise) of continuous and fundamental arising and perishing as a process in cognitive microgenesis.
Woolf’s books are so often viewed as immanently or as transcendently motivated, but it is she who is “haunted by the two contradictions,” the thematic considerations of which are scattered throughout her diaries, in her novels, short stories, essays, and her letters; a haunting which prefigures too in the setting down of a theory of “moments of being” before “non-being” (or otherwise) at the end of her life. Woolf’s theory is about consciousness and what happens when we lack consciousness, her theory is about thinking, it is, of course, she writes, “a mistake to stand outside examining ‘methods’” because such examination as it is, emanates from within, it expresses us, if you will, it defines “what we wish to express,” and this call to method is deliberately theoretical, it “has the merit,” Woolf explains, “of bringing us closer to what we were prepared to call life itself.”
But what is this shift from self to image that Woolf is at pains to express, the transition from “act and object, the epochal nature of this transition, and its relation to introspection, imagination and agency”? My monograph sets out to investigate Woolf as a theoretically motivated novelist.
Conferences Attended
“‘Seeing Human Nature’: A. N. Whitehead and J. W. Brown’s differing patterns of Feeling and Being in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf and Technology: 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, California State University, Fresno, 5-9 June 2024.
“‘The Voices of my Accursed Human Education’: Alain Badiou and Thinking the Inhuman in Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Snake,”’ Virginia Woolf and Ecology: 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Florida Coast University, 8-11 June 2023.
“Mediating the Tension between Stable Identity and the ‘Transmuting Process’ in To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf and Ethics: 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Lamar University, Beaumont, USA, 9-12 Jun 2022 (via Zoom).
“Transmutation, Time and Memory in To the Lighthouse,” Modernist Memories 1922, Before and After, Goethe University, Frankfurt, 23-23 May 2022 (in person).
“‘The Mind Grows Rings; Identity Becomes Robust; Pain is Absorbed in Growth’: Virginia Woolf’s Momentary Microgenesis in The Waves,” Virginia Woolf and Profession and Performance: 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, 9-12 June 2021 (via Zoom).
“Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The ‘Pressure of Meaning,’ Dislocated Justice, and Jason Brown’s Metapsychology of Microgenesis,” Virginia Woolf and Social Justice: 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Mount St. Joseph University, Cincinnati, 6-9 June 2019.